Хироми Каваками - Record of a Night Too Brief

The words rose up around the Kanakana-Dō in an endlessly coiling loop of sound, while inside the shop I could see Mr Kosuga and Nishiko, unperturbed, busy with their tasks. Miss Sanada, it’s important to practise, to keep on your guard, Mr Kosuga told me, watching me as I floated by, giving me a wink. This isn’t “practice”, I retorted—and even on your guard, things can still catch you when you’re unawares! But Mr Kosuga merely rubbed his head, a filterless cigarette in his mouth, his usual impassive self.

“Hiwako, dear, stop being so stubborn, open your eyes!” the woman was saying.

“ You should open your eyes!”

“Oh, that’s so hypocritical.”

The woman was squeezing her fingers tighter and tighter. She still had that expression on her face, an indeterminate mixture of pleasure and pain. Well, if she is strangling me , I thought, placing my fingers around her neck…

In the flashes of intense blue and white light, everything around became dazzlingly, searingly bright, and surrounded by that brightness, pitting our equal strengths, the woman and I struggled, locked in a battle to throttle each other, as the apartment hurtled away at an unbelievable speed.

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HIROMI KAWAKAMIwas born in Tokyo in 1958. She has written numerous novels—among them Strange Weather in Tokyo, The Nakano Thrift Shop and Manazuru —and short-story collections, and has garnered many of Japan’s top literary prizes. Kawakami was shortlisted for both the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize, and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages. Her story “A Snake Stepped On” in this collection won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1996.

LUCY NORTH, born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University and has a PhD in modern Japanese literature. Her translations of Taeko Kōno were published in Toddler Hunting and Other Stories . Lucy lived for many years in Boston and Tokyo, and is now based in Hastings, on the south coast of England.

Series Editors: David Karashima and Michael Emmerich

Translation Editor: Elmer Luke

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HEBI O FUMU © Hiromi Kawakami, 1996

English language translation © Lucy North 2017

Record of a Night Too Brief was first published as Hebi o Fumu in 1996

First published by Pushkin Press in 2017

Parts of “Record of a Night Too Brief” appeared, in slightly different form, in Words without Borders , July 2012.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Centre for Literary Translation and the Nippon Foundation

ISBN 9781782272724