£9.99

Things Remembered and Things Forgotten

by Kyoko Nakajima

Translated from the Japanese by Ian MacDonald and Ginny Tapley Takemori

‘If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination. …imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes.’ So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a prose piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo’s insistently modern culture.

Of the ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are –  by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past. 

Translators

Ian McCullough MacDonald has translated novels, short stories and history, including The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi and the Agatha Christie Award- winning The Black Cat Takes a Stroll. He lives in Singapore.

Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated fiction by more than a dozen early modern and contemporary Japanese authors. Her translation of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman was awarded the 2020-2021 Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Prize. Her translations of Kyoko Nakajima’s The Little House was published in February 2019, and Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings in 2020. She lives in Japan.

Reviews

“These impressive stories bridge past and present, the familiar and the otherworldly, the lost and the found.” - David Mitchell, author

“Wonderful stories ... a perfect introduction to the quiet, subtle brilliance of Kyoko Nakajima.” - David Peace, author of Tokyo Year Zero