Lucy Lower News Today

“Kōno’s heroines are willing to transgress everything ... to take something for themselves: maybe it’s self-definition, or simply pleasure.”

T his unignorably strange collection of stories evokes warring responses of admiration and disgust in the reader: Taeko Kono is a writer who puts the toxic into intoxicating. The selection, written between 1961 and 1971, is a brave choice for one of the launch titles in W&N’s new list of modern classics. (Though the publisher that first gave us Lolita in this country has never shirked controversy.) The recurring motifs are sexual violence and masochism, the protagonists women who occupy m...