This text is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2022 concern of AnOther Journal:
“Once I was seven my grandfather handed away. At his funeral I used to be asking everybody, ‘After Grandpa is burned and became ashes, the place will his personal reminiscences go?’ The issues I take into consideration haven’t modified since. I really feel like demise is all the time someplace in the identical room and its presence is relatively massive. Loss of life won’t ever go away. Slightly, it’s I who will go away the room first, or disappear inside it. It’s not that I’m fearful, however I nearly despair that there’s this unavoidable, inexorable truth of shedding consciousness. For people, demise is essentially the most irrevocable factor. However the truth that being born is, in the identical means, additionally one thing irrevocable is what made me write my novel Breasts and Eggs. All the gradations between life and demise, significantly the sense that demise is one thing that accompanies all dwelling issues and must be handled, in addition to the realisation that every one issues are within the means of being misplaced – these are the sources of my inventive work.”
In 2008, the acclaimed writer Mieko Kawakami shook up her native Japan’s conventional, male-dominated literary scene along with her Akutagawa Prize-winning novel, Breasts and Eggs – an arresting story of three girls navigating adolescence and motherhood in Osaka. The guide was deemed “disagreeable and insupportable” by Tokyo’s governor on the time, Shintaro Ishihara, resulting from its earthy, unflinching descriptions of intercourse, misogyny and the female bodily expertise in a nonetheless largely patriarchal world. In her 2009 guide, Heaven – translated into English final yr and shortlisted for the 2022 Worldwide Booker Prize – Kawakami continues this fearless interrogation of Japanese society, shifting her consideration to teen violence and the brutality of college life. This yr she printed All of the Lovers within the Evening, an incisive story of feminine friendship, loneliness, and the painful seek for connection.
Make-up: Mieko Yoshioka. Photographic assistant: Misaki Kawabe. Producer: Taka Arakawa
This story options within the Autumn/Winter 2022 concern of AnOther Journal, which is on sale internationally now. Purchase a replica right here.
