Description: A fusion of fiction, history, and memoir that replicates the experience of trauma and its effect on memory in ways reminiscent of Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Sebald's The Rings of Saturn.
Brief description: Doug Slaymaker is professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky. His most recent translation is Furukawa Hideo's Horses, Horses, in the Innocence of Light: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima (CUP, 2016). His books include The Body in Postwar Fiction: Japanese Fiction after the War (Routledge, 2004, paperback, 2012); Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War (with James Dorsey, Lexington Books, 2010); and Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere (Lexington Books, 2007). He has published numerous translations.
Review Quotes: This novel, which depicts the 3/11 triple disaster in northeastern Japan in all its complexity, is a marvel. Furukawa's austere writing is as sober as it is inventive and as elegiac as it is hopeful.--Davinder Bhowmik, author of Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance