Staff Pick
This book should come with a warning label! Although each story opens with relatively ordinary domestic scenes, they quickly veer into a perverted distortion of the mundane. Kono explores her characters' darkest desires with astonishing frankness and reveals the pleasure that can be wrung out of pain, degradation, and cruelty. Despite her conciseness, there is a feeling of opacity to the book — the effect is unsettling and oddly exhilarating. Fittingly, the sadomasochistic stories of Toddler Hunting leave the reader just short of sated and longing for more. Recommended By Lauren P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories introduces a startlingly original voice. Winner of Japan's top literary prizes for fiction (among them the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri), Taeko Kono writes with a strange beauty, pinpricked with sadomasochistic and disquieting scenes.
In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls, but compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. The impersonal gaze Taeko Kono turns on this behavior transfixes the reader with a fatal question: What are we hunting for? And why?
Multiplying perspectives and refracting light from the strangely facing mirrors of fantasy and reality, pain and pleasure, these ten stories present Kono at her very best.