Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories

By Taeko Kōno

Book Overview

Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories introduces to American readers a startlingly original voice. Winner of most of Japan's top literary prizes for fiction, Taeko Kono writes with a disquieting and strange beauty, always foregrounding what Choice called "the great power of serious, indeed shocking events." In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls, but she 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? Now available in paperback for the first time, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories should fascinate any reader interested in Japanese literature--or in the growing world of transgressive fiction.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811213919
• ISBN13: 9780811213912
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: New Directions
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.7" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

engrossing, off-beat stories

I'm about a third to half way through this collection, and just wanted to enter an enthusiastic "thumbs up" in case I don't get a chance to do a fuller review later. The longish stories mostly take place in post-war Japan (maybe post-post-war is better, after the effects of WWII have largely died down and modernization is in full swing), and reveal an interesting society and women's place in it. [One, 'Full Tide', is set at the beginning of the war.] The prose is simple and straightforward, at least in translation, but the stories are surprisingly powerful and take some odd twists, with characters who often have a twist or quirk of their own. This will be enjoyed not just by 'literery' fiction fans -- my own tastes run to nonfiction or 'genre' fiction, but I've found it engrossing with rests between stories to absorb them.

Haunting, but not intentionally

Although, at first sight, her work does not seem to be appealing, it immediately led me to read through these rather haunting stories. Her writing style is quite eloquent and inspiring. Different from other rather self-centered novelists (e.g., Dazai, Mishima, Natsume, etc.), she stays as a objective narrator in her work, and her structiring ability of plot is almost astonishing. Probably she is a natally most talented writer in modern Japan.