One for Japanese literature obsessives, the fabulously titled Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami is a trio of increasingly trippy stories, centred on women undergoing transformative (to say the least) life experiences. Originally published in 1996, Kawakami’s rising stardom blessed us with an English translation in 2017. In this gem from the Pushkin Press Japanese Short Story Collection, Kawakami considers convention and tradition alongside the strangests of plots, her seemingly everyday women plunged into surreal tales involving unending night, shape-shifting, and a family whose members are prone to vanishing.
The stand-out story of the collection and winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, is a serpentine affair called A Snake Stepped On. It tells the story of an apathetic young woman named Hiwako, who steps on a snake whilst walking in a local park one day. The snake, evocatively described as ‘porous and borderless and infinite,’ morphs into a fifty-something woman, who, with freshly grown legs, heads briskly in the direction of Hiwako’s nearby apartment, soon to declare that she is, in fact, Hiwako’s real mother, here to care for her daughter, and it transpires, to tempt her to switch allegiance to the world of snakes.
Kawakami’s bizarre tale contains a hint of biblical temptation. Snakes are infiltrating this human environment, intent on luring women, although the reward may seem dubious to the reader. Trigger warning: in one particularly alarming scene, scores of tiny snakes swarm up their female prey’s arms and neck, dissolving inside her inner ears in a vile viscosity, en route to her brain. A scene to make ophidiophobes squirm!
Hiwako is a curiously deadpan narrator, something she has in common with the protagonists of the remaining two stories in the collection. All three women often appear passive and powerless. As a comment on female oppression in patriarchal Japan, this is most evident in the story, Missing, where bizarre family mythology and rituals mean that the women get a particularly raw deal.
The unnamed female narrator must move out of the family home when her brother’s betrothed, Hiroko, moves in, because families are obliged to contain five members only. When her brother unfortunately dies (don’t feel too sorry for him, he comes back as a ghost to molest both Hiroko and his sister), a second brother is wheeled in to marry her instead. Poor Hiroko will begin to shrink, both literally and metaphorically.
Perhaps the most transformative tale of all is the titular one, Record of a Night Too Brief, where a young woman enters a reverie that sends her into an unending night. It begins with an irritating itch on her back that she realises is the night itself, ‘a black clump…eating away at my back.’
Swept away into a realm of magical realism, the woman takes a deep dive into her subconscious, in the sometime company of a girl who may be her lover or own true self.
Beautifully translated by Lucy North, this collection is both a mind-bending treat and a must for Kawakami completists.
Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami is published by Pushkin Press and translated by Lucy North, 169 pages.
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