The Word Book
By Mieko Kanai
1979
First Published
3.55
Average Rating
178
Number of Pages
Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things to one another—Mieko Kanai creates a reality where nothing is certain, and where a little boy going out to run errands for his mother might find that he’s an adult, and his mother long dead, at the end of a single train ride. Using precise language to describe dreamlike plots owing as much to Kafka and Barthelme as to Kenzaburō Ōe and the long tradition of the Japanese folktale of the macabre, The Word Book is an unforgettable voyage to absurd, hilarious, and terrifying locales, and is the English-language debut for one of the greatest and most interesting Japanese writers working today.
Avg Rating
3.55
Number of Ratings
171
5 STARS
21%
4 STARS
35%
3 STARS
26%
2 STARS
14%
1 STARS
4%
goodreads
Author
Mieko Kanai
Author · 5 books
Mieko Kanai (金井 美恵子 Kanai Mieko?, born November 3, 1947 in Takasaki) is a Japanese writer of fiction, especially short stories, as well as poetry. She is also a literary critic. Mieko Kanai read widely in fiction and poetry from an early age. In 1967, at the young age of twenty, she was runner-up for the Dazai Osamu Prize for Ai no seikatsu (A Life of Love), and the following year she received the Gendaishi Techo Prize for poetry. While maintaining a certain distance from literary circles and journalism, she has built up her own world of fiction with a sensual style. Along with her fiction, her criticism, which shows off her scathing, acid insight, has a devoted following.
