‘Moonlight Shadow’ by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Megan Backus

Usually included with Banana Yoshimoto’s zesty debut novel Kitchen, Moonlight Shadow encapsulates much of what I so admire about her writing. Though she is emotionally unguarded, her cheerfulness is often tinged with stoicism and grief. In this story a young woman recovers from the death of her boyfriend and, as is typical in Banana Yoshimoto’s work, the supernatural and natural worlds open to each other to bridge the gap between what we feel and what we understand.

A lover should die after a long lifetime. I lost Hitoshi at the age of twenty, and I suffered from it so much that I felt as if my own life had stopped. The night he died, my soul went away to some other place and I couldn’t bring it back. It was impossible to see the world as I had before. My brain ebbed and flowed, unstable, and I passed the days in a relentless state of dull oppression.

Published in Kitchen, Faber 1997

‘The Neighborhood Phone’ by Gabriella Ghermandi, translated from Italian by Giovanna Bellesia-Contuzzi and by Victoria Offredi Poletto

The Italo-Ethiopian writer Gabriella Ghermandi was born in Addis Ababa in 1965 and moved to Italy in 1979. This evocative story tells of her return to Ethiopia, and the strange homelessness of those who belong in two places and therefore neither place. The story revolves around the only telephone in the village and the people whose lives are connected by it. This is a place of sleepy inefficiency and poverty, jarringly so for the author; however, within the story there is the flowering of a sense of home and continuity.

I cried all of the following days, in front of my old house with the abandoned garden, at my father’s grave, whenever the phone rang, when I saw the witch. I cried and I washed the anger of such a long separation out of my heart. Finally, I felt light in my heart and I no longer minded the waits by the phone, the buses that never seemed to leave, the lines to buy sugar, the haggling with taxi drivers, the hugs of dirty children. My land was once again familiar to me.

First published in English in Words Without Borders, December 2008, and available to read online here

‘Pursuit’ by Naguib Mahfouz, translated from Arabic by Roger Allen

This is one of eighteen lost stories by Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian writer and first Arabic author to win the Nobel Prize. Though not his strongest work, the collection – recently discovered, and published in English by Saqi press – captures the timeless storytelling touch of Mahfouz and his ability to wrap the individual into society to make something universal. In this story a woman returns to town nursing her illegitimate baby; powerless and poor she seeks redress by her will and wits.

In one hand she would hold a basket full of halva squares and in the other she clutched her baby. She began to move from face to face, hawking her halva, but it seemed she was making a special point of standing in front of Boss Uthman’s shop. She made sure that he could hear her voice or see her in person. He could not ignore her forever.

First published in The Quarter, Saqi Press, 2019

‘This Hostel Life’ by Melatu Uche Okorie

This title piece from a three-story collection is by former asylum seeker Melatu Uche Okorie, originally from Nigeria but now living in Ireland where she is doing a PhD in creative writing. It tells of the experience of the controversial direct provision system with a clear voice and gift for voicing her characters. Irish writing is still very much lacking in diversity and this collection offers a perspective on Ireland and Irish people we have not seen in fiction before.

In my last hostel dey give you provision any day, but it’s gonna be one month since you collect last. So if you get toilet paper today, it’s gonna be one month before you get another. Dat is why me I happy when dey give me every week for here, now, me I don feel happy again. Dis direct provision business is all the same, you see, because even if you collect provision for every week or you collect for every month, it is still somebody dat is give you the provision. Nothing is better than when you decide something for yourself.

First published in This Hostel Life by Skein Press, 2018. Also available from Virago, 2019

‘Letters without Envelopes’ by Suzana Tratnik, translated from Slovene by Špela Bibič

This story from Slovenian writer Suzana Tratnik tells of a go-between in a lesbian love affair between Mara – who describes herself as the only lesbian in 1980s Yugoslavia – and Ana, her secret lover. In the era before email, the narrator is the conduit through which the two lovers correspond. This is a touching account of war and its many manifestations, and the resourcefulness of the truest human feelings.

Mara’s first letter came in the autumn of the late 1980s. The fact that she had gotten my address in Switzerland, as she explained at the beginning, seemed incredible to me, almost mysterious. She lived in Dalmatia, in a town I had never been to. She wrote me a two-page letter, mentioning more than once that she was a lesbian, probably the only one in Dalmatia, if not the whole of Croatia. For a number of years, she had been visiting her uncle in Zurich and particularly her friend Uli, whom she had met at the city’s lesbian center. Uli was therefore the only lesbian she knew. But on her last visit to Zurich, her Swiss friend had assured her that she was no longer the only lesbian in Yugoslavia.

First published in translation in Words Without Borders, June 2013, and available to read online here

‘The Last Day’ by Jaroslavas Melnikas, translated from Lithuanian by Marija Marcinkute

Jaroslavas Melnikas is a Lithuanian of Ukranian descent and this story is from a collection that won him the BBC Book of the Year. With Melnikas we always get an interesting premise. In this story a book is created which foretells with accuracy the date of death of everyone alive. This acts as the opening note which reverberates throughout the narrative as people come to terms with the implications of knowing their fate and that of their loved ones. There is a parable-like feel to this story, though it concludes on ambiguous note, leaving us question what moral, if any, we are to draw from it, or indeed, from Life.

At first it just seemed bizarre. Three hundred thousand people from all over the world filed a lawsuit against the madman in whose warehouse the eight million volumes were heaped. He had poured nearly all his wealth into printing the thick volumes. It was blasphemy. He was obviously mad. Only a lunatic would print the dates of the deaths of everybody on the planet.

First published in translation by Noir Press, 2018

‘Record of a Night Too Brief’ by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Lucy North

This story, and the collection it comes from, marks a contrast in style from Hiromi Kawakami’s later novels about romantic intimacy, such as Strange Weather in Tokyo (tr Alison Markin Powell). In this story she experiments with surrealism, creating dream-like settings where confusion and the threat of danger weigh on the text. This approach allows her to move into a more abstractly psychological style of writing reminiscent of Korean writer Bae Suah or Chinese writer Can Xue.

What was that itch on my back, I wondered. And then I realized: the night was nibbling into me.It wasn’t that late yet, still only dusk, but the darkness appeared to be collecting just above my shoulders. A particularly black clump of it had fastened onto my back, and a part of the area where it was touching me had been eaten away.
I wriggled and tried to shake it off, but the night clung fast.

First published in translation in Words Without Borders, July 2012, and available to read online here. Collected in Record of a Night Too Brief, Pushkin Press, 2017

Introduction

For me, reading a collection of short stories is like being at a party and having multiple short conversations with people I don’t know well. Striking up a conversation and getting to know them requires a degree of effort. Some of them may confront my beliefs and assumptions with disturbing violence. I find sinking deep into a long novel much easier, like entering into a relationship with a degree of trust: a relationship in which you can freely pick up again where you left off, at whatever page. Nevertheless, some of the most memorable interactions in one’s life may be with strangers at a party.

Under normal circumstances I tend to read a lot more novels than short stories, but since the pandemic hit, I have been mainlining surreal Japanese short stories, the quirkier the better. I’m sure there are an infinite number of stories out there I have yet to discover, and I am excited to do so, but my available head space now resembles a London studio flat.

‘Nudes in the Twenty-first Century’ by Jill Varani

This story breaks my heart over and over, but it does so with such exquisite irony and attention to sensory detail, I prefer it broken. I still feel the pain of the slow reveal of the narrative, in which the overlooked or fetishized scars of motherhood are laid bare.

It begins with the protagonist posing for a life drawing class.

When it’s over, she scans the drawings. It’s always a shock. Narcissus at the lake. She sees herself anew. Through their eyes, two dimensional. The odd length of her torso, the smallness of her hands. And the scar. Lightning from her cheek, along her chest to her tummy, forked like flames. Drawn in silver or deep purple or grey, smudged charcoal. It looks like a tattoo on some of the pictures. Stuck on, an afterthought. But she finds it most disconcerting when the artists have chosen to leave it out. As if they had tried not to see it. Instead smoothing her out, cleaning her up.

Nothing is smoothed out, nothing is cleaned up here.

First published in the Sunday Star Times, December 2019. Winner of the Open category of the 2019 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards, available on Stuff

‘Careless’ by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by Lucy North

A man and his wife have moved into a cheap apartment building which is infested with insects. This story captures the creepiness of reproduction, real estate, and (im)moral proximity in the 21^st century. I think this piece of dialogue sums up the malaise of self-preserving willed ignorance and disconnection that haunts modern lifestyles:

…The best way is to just take no notice. We’ve been living here for well over four years, and they haven’t done us any harm. If anything, once you start paying them attention, it only makes it worse. There’s no controlling them. You have to will yourself not to see them. They’ll stop bothering you once you do that. It’ll be like they’re not there.

Translator Lucy North is one of my personal heroes, and this is incredibly well translated: I can’t find a single clunky sentence, odd word choice, unclear meaning, or anything else that jars or makes it obvious that this is a translation, and the text as a whole sings.

From Oyamada’s short story collection Niwa (Garden), published in March 2018. First published in English translation by Granta in September 2019 and available online here

‘Kepa’ by Patricia Grace

I read this story when I was a child who played bullrush (known as ‘bulldog’ in the UK) until it was banned at our school after a student’s arm was broken, and although I’m not tangata whenua, it shocked me to read a story that looked more like my actual life than any I’d read before. The paddock and the children in it looked a lot like my school playground, minus the cowpats. This story stayed with me and changed how I thought about stories: the idea that one could write about how things actually were in one’s day-to-day reality, cowpats and all, and that not all stories happened in a fantastic world, like Middle-earth or far-off London.

First published in The Dream Sleepers and Other Stories, Longman Paul, 1980. Collected in Collected Stories: Patricia Grace, Penguin, 1994

‘Cat Person’ by Kristen Roupenian

This is a graphically explicit tale of contemporary girl-meets-older-man. The protagonist grapples with digital intimacy and disconnection, desire and bad sex.

In this story the young and female experience is lifted up and given literary heft and importance. I believe that we may often find it easy to dismiss such a perspective as “trashy”, “chick lit”, and inherently unworthy, so it made me very happy to see this in The New Yorker.

It was a terrible kiss, shockingly bad; Margot had trouble believing that a grown man could possibly be so bad at kissing.

First published in The New Yorker, December 4, 2017, and available to read online here. Collected in You Know You Want This, Jonathan Cape, 2019

‘The Woman Dies’ by Aoko Matsuda, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton

In this beautiful translation, which captures the rhythm of the source text so artfully, the woeful fates of female characters in fiction and the way our real life experiences are shaped by them are explored with humour and pathos.

The woman dies so the man can be sad about it. The woman dies so the man can suffer. She dies to give him a destiny. Dies so he can fall to the dark side. Dies so he can lament her death. As he stands there, brimming with grief, brimming with life, the woman lies there in silence. The woman dies for him. We watch it happen. We read about it happening. We come to know it well.

First published in English translation in November 2018 on Granta online and available here. It was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award in 2019. From the collection Wairudo furawa no mienai ichinen (The Year of No Wild Flowers), Kawadeshoboshinsha, 2016

‘The Amnesty’ by Jen Calleja

From the beginning, this story made me uncomfortable (in a good way). It seemed to be demanding a great deal of introspection and analysis of gender and power from the reader. After this initial discomfort wore off, I was drawn in by its comic melancholy, brutal bluntness, and searingly absurd images, which still linger in my mind at odd moments.They practically ruined my day because I couldn’t stop thinking about how utterly inadequate they both were to me. I went over to them, hung my bag off the shoulder of the young one and put my wide-brimmed hat on his head, and lay my briefcase on the lap of the old limp thing, popped it open, took out my newspaper and started reading it, silently defying either of them to look at me.

First published in Calleja’s short story collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For (Prototype, 2020). Reproduced in The London Magazine, April 2020, and available at The London Magazine