Dunderhead (ISOLARII, Band 17) - Softcover

Yoshida, Tomoko

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798987123195

Verlag: ISOLARII, 2027

Inhaltsangabe

Three clinically precise stories of scarcity, pride, and resentment rooted in the afterlife of empire.

Dunderhead is the book-length English-language debut of Tomoko Yoshida, age 92: a brutal, lucid triptych—of poverty, resentment, the body's last defences—written between 1967 and 1977. 

A bored grocery store employee drowns a neighbor's kitten in sewage, nudging a pram downhill until it meets a telephone pole. A man visits his dying enemy—and only friend—in a final attempt at dominance. A poor, shame-ridden woman named “Crab” observes the violence surrounding her home.

Yoshida's work is rooted in the afterlife—and trauma—of empire. Her father, a military colonel, led her through six schools across mainland Japan and Manchuria, then to Sakhalin in 1945, where Soviet soldiers took him from their home, and he was never seen again. In the years that followed, still a teenager, she wrote to Yukio Mishima, asking to stage one of his plays. He agreed, and her career began. Years later, when she received the Akutagawa Prize, Mishima served on the jury. She would go on to found the literary magazine Gomu, alongside her husband, in 1963, and later Baru, a publication she started and edited into her late eighties. She still writes every day. A cult figure of the highest order, closely read by the generation of writers who came after her—Yoko Ogawa, Hiroko Oyamada, Hiromi Kawakami. Though often describing it, Yoshida’s writing hardly lingers on tragedy, attending instead to the landscapes that emerge in its wake. Beneath the starkness of her world, there is a deep empathy for the “dunderheads” who carry it.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tomoko Yoshida is a cornerstone of Japanese avant-garde literature. She grew up between mainland Japan and Manchukuo and was stranded on Sakhalin after WWII. Her fiction has won several of Japan’s major literary prizes and she is the founder of the magazines Gomu and Baru.

Polly Barton is an award-winning writer and translator of Japanese literature. She has translated works such as Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa. Her debut novel, What Am I, a Deer? was published in 2026.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ISOLARII
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2027
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798987123195
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 324
• Herausgeber: Barton Polly
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar