Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks

Snappy Japanese surrealism . . . Like a lot of Japanese fiction in translation (I’m thinking Sayaka Murata, Hiromi Kawakami, Yoko Ogawa), Imamura’s prose eschews ornamentation: she sets up her odd situations and lets them unfold in a doggedly simple fashion, with little in the way of obvious metaphor or even description. As strange as the stories are in terms of plot and characterisation, they read like fables, though fables that take, in all three cases, decidedly dark turns – more Brothers Grimm than old Aesop. The simplicity and clarity of the prose, then, belies the emotional and social complexity that the stories suggest as they push relentlessly through to ends that do not reflect at all reflect the buoyancy of the opening pages . . . These stories are quick reads, but like good poetry, they’ll snag in your mind long after they’re done.