Toddler Hunting and Other Stories

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What to expect

Akiko couldn't abide little girls between three and ten years old - she detested them more than any other kind of human being.


'Fiery, beguiling stories' Paris Review

'The power of the artfully spun words make the reader shudder' Sayaka Murata

'The female writer I most admire among all the Japanese authors' Shusaku Endo

On a Saturday night that feels filled with excitement, Fukuko and her husband decide to visit, unannounced, another couple. So begins a bewitching imagined journey into the forbidden.

Fumiko's passion for her husband thrives on sadomasochism. But now she may be pregnant and the ants that crawl over a piece of meat in her kitchen, squirm obscenely, teasing and goading her on.

When Akiko thinks about how she cannot have children, she feels an emotion close to joy. But though she loathes little girls, she cannot resist buying expensive clothes in which to dress little boys.

From one of the most influential voices in Japanese literature, these extraordinary stories introduce us to women risking self-destruction to fulfil their desires.

With an Introduction by Sayaka Murata

Critics Review

There are resonances here with Tanizaki, but Kono's subversions feel somehow scarier, in part because of her deadpan prose and in part because she strikes at sacred paradigms of motherhood and femininity
The Wall Street Journal
It does a disservice to this collection of stories, which were originally published throughout the 1960s, to focus too much on its flashes of sadomasochism; but it's difficult not to start there. But the pleasure in Kono's work is not only, or even primarily, derived from its daring. These stories are also captivating in traditional ways
NY Times
The fiery, beguiling stories in TODDLER HUNTING AND OTHER STORIES are vertiginous tightrope walks between two planes of reality. Kono's writing is shocking, ominous, and subversive
The Paris Review
Left me shaken and in awe; they are incendiary, beautiful, and frightening confrontations of the lives we keep hidden from others
Gabe Habash, author of Stephen Florida
Japanese master of the unsettling: Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction
Kirkus
Reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's works, Kono's stories explore the dark, terrifying side of human nature that manifests itself in antisocial behaviour
World Literature Today

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