An epic novel of postwar Japan—a powerful reckoning with empire, catastrophe, trauma, and truth-telling—by the author of Territory of Light. Mitch and Yonko haven’t spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo—but ever since the sudden death of Mitch’s brother, they’ve been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster. Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they’ve kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it’s all around them. Like history, it repeats itself. Yuko Tsushima’s sweeping and consuming final novel is a metaphysical saga of postwar Japan. Wildcat Dome is a hugely ambitious exploration of denial, of the ways in which countries and their citizens avoid telling the truth—a tale of guilt, loss, and inevitable reckoning.
Author
Yūko Tsushima is the pen name of Satoko Tsushima, a contemporary Japanese fiction writer, essayist and critic. She is the daughter of famed novelist Osamu Dazai, who died when she was one year old. She is considered "one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation" (The New York Times). She has won many major literary prizes, including the Kawabata for "The Silent Traders," one of the stories in The Shooting Gallery, and the Tanizaki for Mountain of Fire. Her early fiction, from which The Shooting Gallery is drawn, was largely based on her experience as a single mother. Her multilayered narrative techniques have increasingly taken inspiration from the Ainu oral epics (yukar) and the tales of premodern Japan. When invited to teach Japanese literature to graduate students in Paris, she taught the yukar, and her seminar led to the publication of Tombent, tombent les gouttes d’argent: Chants du peuple aïnou (1996), the first French edition of the epic poems. Tsushima is active in networks such as the Japan-India Writers’ Caravans and dialogues with Korean and Chinese writers. Recent novels have been set in Taiwan during Japanese colonial rule, among the Kyrgyz, in medieval Nara, and in post-3/11 Tokyo. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages.
