Toddler Hunting and Other Stories

There are resonances here with Tanizaki, but Kono’s subversions feel somehow scarier, in part because of her deadpan prose and in part because she strikes at sacred paradigms of motherhood and femininity * The Wall Street Journal *
It does a disservice to this collection of stories, which were originally published throughout the 1960s, to focus too much on its flashes of sadomasochism; but it’s difficult not to start there. But the pleasure in Kono’s work is not only, or even primarily, derived from its daring. These stories are also captivating in traditional ways * NY Times *
The fiery, beguiling stories in TODDLER HUNTING AND OTHER STORIES are vertiginous tightrope walks between two planes of reality. Kono’s writing is shocking, ominous, and subversive * The Paris Review *
Left me shaken and in awe; they are incendiary, beautiful, and frightening confrontations of the lives we keep hidden from others * Gabe Habash, author of Stephen Florida *
Japanese master of the unsettling: Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction * Kirkus *
Reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s works, Kono’s stories explore the dark, terrifying side of human nature that manifests itself in antisocial behaviour * World Literature Today *

Taeko Kono (1926 -2015) is one of the most important Japanese writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Oe Kenzaburo, Japan’s Nobel Laureate, described her as the most “lucidly intelligent” woman writer writing in Japan, and Masao Miyoshi identified her as among the most “critically alert and historically intelligent.” Davinder Bhowmik assesses her as “…one of the truly original voices of the twentieth century, beyond questions of gender or even nationality.”

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