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Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories introduces to American readers a startlingly original voice. Kono Taeko has won all of Japan's major literary prizes for fiction (among them the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri). Her disquieting stories, with their strange beauty and undercurrent of sadomasochism, bring to mind Tanizaki, but in a new vein. Subtly ruthless, they lift the latch on complacent views of womanhood.
In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls, but she compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them struggle to dress and undress. The impersonal gaze Kono Taeko turns on this behavior transfixes the reader with a fatal question: What are we hunting for? And why?
Exploring freedom and bondage, these stories refract light from the strangely facing mirrors of fantasy and reality; pain and pleasure; the active and the passive. As the tales consider the possibilities, implications, and limitations of romantic masochism, Kono Taeko's narrative voice gives the impression of being "inside" and "outside" at once. Viewing couples' shifting complex power issues through the eyes of women, the author indirectly addresses their position in the world. And with a brave, eerie stylistic purity, Kono Taeko renders the unpronounceable palpable.
