Toddler Hunting and Other Stories

An immeasurably influential female voice in post-war Japanese literature, Kono writes with a strange and disorienting beauty: her tales are marked by disquieting scenes, her characters all teetering on the brink of self-destruction.

In the famous title story, the protagonist loathes young girls but compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. Taeko Kono's detached gaze at these events is transfixing: What are we hunting for? And why? Kono rarely gives the reader straightforward answers, rather reflecting, subverting and examining their expectations, both of what women are capable of, and of the narrative form itself.

“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

Taeko Kono (1926 -2015) is one of the most important Japanese writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Oe Kenzaburo, Japan's Nobel Laureate, described her as the most "lucidly intelligent" woman writer writing in Japan, and the US critic and academic Masao Miyoshi identified her as among the most "critically alert and historically intelligent." US critic and academic Davinder Bhowmik assesses her as "...one of the truly original voices of the twentieth century, beyond questions of gender or even nationality."

An immeasurably influential female voice in post-war Japanese literature, Kono writes with a strange and disorienting beauty: her tales are marked by disquieting scenes, her characters all teetering on the brink of self-destruction. In the famous title story, the protagonist loathes young girls but compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. Taeko Kono's detached gaze at these events is transfixing: What are we hunting for? And why? Kono rarely gives the reader straightforward answers, rather reflecting, subverting and examining their expectations, both of what women are capable of, and of the narrative form itself.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.