Record of a Night too Brief

About

One woman travels through an apparently unending night accompanied by a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters, and villainous monkeys. A sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see. A couple discovers that the dead have their own ideas about being remembered. Hiromi Kawakami's Akutagawa Prize-winning stories blend the surreal and the emotional with the ease of someone dreaming in both languages simultaneously. Each story in this collection begins in familiar territory — grief, romance, loneliness — and then quietly detours into the fantastic. The transition is never jarring because Kawakami treats the supernatural as simply another register of human feeling. Stories about the night side of ordinary emotions — written by someone who understands that the strangest things we feel are also the most real.