Record of a Night Too Brief

The Akutagawa Prize-winning stories from one of the most highly regarded and provocative contemporary Japanese writers: part of our Japanese novella series, showcasing the best contemporary Japanese writing.

In these three haunting and lyrical stories, three young women experience unsettling loss and romance.

In a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters and villainous monkeys; a sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see, while the rest of her family welcome his would-be wife into their home; and an accident with a snake leads a shop girl to discover the snake-families everyone else seems to be concealing.

Sensual, yearning, and filled with the tricks of memory and grief, Record of a Night Too Brief is an atmospheric trio of unforgettable tales.

Hiromi Kawakami was born in Tokyo in 1958. She has written numerous novels and collections of short stories, including Strange Weather in Tokyo and The Nakano Thrift Shop. She has been awarded the Akutagawa Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Her work has been published in more than twenty languages.