Read more
By turns introspective, surreal, and bitingly funny, this collection of linked short stories spans seven decades across Japan and the United States and shows a family’s tenacity in the face of relationships fractured by language and distance.
List of contents
1
Hideto, in Motion and at Rest
Hideto Worn Down in Gainesville, 2001
My Mother Takes Me to a Public Bath
Yukari Kneeling in My Mother’s Garden, 1994
Chie and George, 2015
Half-Blind
My Father Will Not Admit He Has Become a Clown
2
The Mystery of Animal Grief
Nishina Sekio in a Tunnel Alone
Preparations, 2015
Home Burial
Housefire
Suicide Drills, 1945
The Grandma Invasion
We Are a Woman Bombed / A Picture of Grace
Nishina Sekio in a Broken Machine
Harvest Mouse
Hack Science
A Shark Is an Animal That Blushes When You Touch Its Face
Synonyms for Climate Change
Boundless Deep
My Grandmother Stops Some Nights on Her Way to the Outhouse to Watch a Ghost Climb Down to the Sea
Nishina Sekio Imprisoned in Dreams
3
My Father and Shigenobu Fusako in the Hallway of the Hotel New Otani, 1980
Or Go Further Back
Elastico
What My Mother Doesn’t Say
The Failings of Our Fathers
Incredible Lifelike Whale Comes Up for Air, Again and Again
Acknowledgments
Selected Sources
About the author
Gen Del Raye is a translator, fiction writer, and poet and was trained as an oceanographer. He was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan, and lives in Minneapolis. His writing has appeared in the
Gettysburg Review,
Poetry Northwest,
Best Small Fictions 2017, and
Best New Poets 2019, among others. He is the winner of the Force Majeure Flash Contest, Up North Poetry Prize, and Great Midwest Poetry Contest and was awarded a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship.
Summary
By turns introspective, surreal, and bitingly funny, this collection of linked short stories spans seven decades across Japan and the United States and shows a family’s tenacity in the face of relationships fractured by language and distance.
