The End of the Moment We Had
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Two brilliant, multi-layered stories from the winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize: part of our Japanese novella series, showcasing the best contemporary Japanese writing.
On the eve of the Iraq War, a man and a woman meet in a nightclub in Tokyo. They go to a love hotel, and spend the next five days in a torrid affair. Written in a stream of consciousness, with the reader's perceptions shifting and melting into one another, what is remarkable in this story is not what happens, but the ability of the writer to enter the minds and memories of the protagonists.
In the second story, a woman living in a damp flat obsesses on the filthy state of her dwelling. She remains in bed for the duration of the narrative, but the drama and tension of her inner life - spiralling further and further into her memories and anxieties - keep the reader engrossed to the very end.
The End of the Moment We Had demonstrates the fluidity and richness of this extraordinarily gifted writer's language and ideas.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Okada delivers a pair of intriguing novellas set in Tokyo for his first book to be published in the U.S. In the title novella, set during the early aughts, a bored young man named Azuma splits off from his hard-partying friends at an open mic night and disappears with a lonely girl. Together at one of the city's love hotels, they engage in a four-night marathon of revelatory sex that sends Okada's prose spiraling into ecstasy. The second story, "My Place in Plural" is as sedate as the first story is frenzied, featuring the interior monologue of a bored and sedentary housewife as, in a clever send-up of modern tech dependency, she obsesses over her phone, laptop, and television while her marriage and even her home collapses around her. The climax, if there is one, comes either when she decides to sever the cord of her husband's game system or when she throws her phone at a cockroach. These novellas showcase Okada's ability to completely inhabit the consciousness of crowds and characters, in both ferocious extremity and repose.
