Record of a Night too Brief

Book 3: Japanese Novellas

by Hiromi Kawakami

Genres: Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The Akutagawa Prize-winning stories from one of the most highly regarded and provocative contemporary Japanese writers: part of our Japanese novella series, showcasing the best contemporary Japanese writing.

In these three haunting and lyrical stories, three young women experience unsettling loss and romance.

In a dreamlike adventure, one woman travels through an apparently unending night with a porcelain girlfriend, mist-monsters and villainous monkeys; a sister mourns her invisible brother whom only she can still see, while the rest of her family welcome his would-be wife into their home; and an accident with a snake leads a shop girl to discover the snake-families everyone else seems to be concealing.

Sensual, yearning, and filled with the tricks of memory and grief, Record of a Night Too Brief is an atmospheric trio of unforgettable tales.

Release date: December 5, 2017

Publisher: Pushkin Press

Print pages: 96

Sample

1 Horse
What was that itch on my back? I wondered. And then
I realized that it was the night—the night was nibbling
into me.
It wasn’t that late, still only twilight, but the darkness
seemed to have collected just above my shoulders. A black
clump of it had fastened onto me, eating away at my back.
I wriggled, trying to shake it off, but the night clung
fast. When I tried to rip it off with my hands, it floated
away, as vapour, and I couldn’t grasp it. I grabbed at a
patch, where it was most intensely black, but immediately
it dispersed, and another black patch swirled up somewhere
else.
The itchiness became unbearable. I scratched frantically.
The more I scratched, the more the darkness ate into
my back, and the more the darkness ate into my back, the
more I itched.
Unable to stand still, I broke into a run.
Immediately, I was running as fast as a horse. I thought,
as I ran: you get faster when the night starts eating into
you. Roads, pedestrians, signs, all fly by, retreating into the
distance, like scenes through a train window.
After a minute or two I grew sick of running, so I stopped.
My body was giving off steam like a horse. I was breathing
loudly through my nose. Some of the darkness merged with
the steam, producing swirling, hazy eddies.
People, standing at a distance, stared.
The darkness mixed with the breaths I was taking in,
reappearing when I breathed out, floating in long trails.
When I inhaled, the dark trails near my nostrils were sucked
back in. When I exhaled again, they were longer than before.
The darkness grew, stretching out like endless ribbons,
issuing forth from my nostrils.
“That’s a sight you don’t see every day,” an onlooker
exclaimed, and then clapped, purposefully, as if summoning
koi to the surface of a pond. The other onlookers clapped
too, in just the same way.
I grew irritated. “Get the fuck outta here!” I tried to shout.
But no words emerged from my mouth. I couldn’t get the
first consonant out. Straining, blowing through my nostrils,
bearing down, I tried for that first sound: “G— G— G—” But
all I could manage was to snort and blow out air.
The onlookers were delighted, and clapped some more.
This infuriated me. I leapt into the air, trying to yell at
them, but all that came out was a whinny—like I was a horse.
I kept leaping. Landing on a roof, I whinnied again—and
then again. The onlookers below were all clapping. I wasn’t
going to be outdone by them, and I kept whinnying. By now
I had acquired a horse’s body, and was covered with a thick
black coat of hair.
“Night’s coming. The Night Horse has arrived,” an
onlooker said—the first in the crowd to have clapped. At
that moment the steam started to rise in clouds off my body.
More darkness: spreading, covering everything.
Elated now, I whinnied over and over again. With every
whinny, the darkness became blacker and more intense.


2 Chaos
While I was walking, the number of people increased. We
were all going in the same direction. I walked, swept along
in the flow.
It was after dusk, an hour closer to night. I could see the
outlines of people walking just ahead of me, but couldn’t
tell the colour of their clothes. A lamplighter approached,
holding a long pole, pushing his way against the stream of
people. Raising the pole up to a lamp, he let it rest there a
few seconds, and the lamp started to glow. Looking around,
I realized that there were several lamplighters: everywhere
about me, one street lamp after another started to give out
a steady light.
Now there were even more people walking, and it was
difficult keeping up the pace.
“Are you going too?”
I glanced over my shoulder, and saw a slender girl with
short hair walking behind me.
“I was thinking about it…,” I answered, without quite
committing myself.
Hearing this, the girl, who didn’t stop walking, removed
an envelope from her satchel, and opened it, all the while
keeping pace with the stream of people.
In the envelope were some green tickets.
“I have an extra. You take it,” she said, as she quickly
slipped the green ticket into my pocket. I was going to
thank her—but she waved me off and pointed at the
people behind us. Some kind of hitch had stopped the
flow of people, and there was a pile-up. Knots of people
were starting to form, and as more people kept coming
from behind them, soon some of the knots were getting
pushed up into the air, on top of the knots of people below
them.
Quickly I turned to face forward again, and started
to walk. A long gap had opened up between us and the
people in front of us. Thinking I ought to catch up with
them, I broke into a run. But again the girl stopped me.
“Don’t run, or we’ll have chaos. It’s too early. Too early.”
I didn’t understand what she was referring to, but in
any case I resumed walking.
We seemed to be approaching a termination point. The
stream of people was spreading out. Just ahead, something
very tall was rising up to the sky.
Several dozen ticket collectors stood in a row, and once
we passed through, showing our tickets, the tall object
came into better view.
It was a singer, who stood as tall as a three-storey building.
From where I was, I had a clear view of the beauty spot
under her jaw, and the rise and fall of her breasts.
“The beauty spot is artificial,” the girl informed me,
gazing up at the singer, enraptured.
The singer was producing notes at different pitches, as
if she were warming up. When she sang high notes, flocks
of birds took flight from the branches of the gingko trees.
When she sang low notes, the earth heaved, and small
furry creatures emerged from underground and crawled
about.
When the square was packed with people, suddenly,
with no warning, the singer commenced singing. It was
as if an immense musical instrument was filling the
firmament with sound, or as if the melody of her song
was swimming through the skies… In the next moment
her voice had overwhelmed all else, and rather than
listening, we seemed to be encompassed within it. No
longer able to know the words, we were conscious only
that her lilting voice was, slowly and powerfully, all
around us.
The crowd of people, filled with her music, started to
break up and form lines, which began to flow from the
square in every direction, like innumerable streams flowing
from a lake.
“The chaos has started,” the girl said to me, joining a
stream of people going by her. I watched as she was borne
away.
I joined the same stream of people, and pretty soon
caught up with her.
“Where are we going?” I enquired. The girl nodded several
times, her eyes closed, looking unworried.
“Where?” I asked again.
“The night,” she replied.
With that, her head tilted downwards, and she fell into
a deep sleep. She was carried along as she slept.
Now a part of the chaos, alongside the girl, I entered
the night.