Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 127: Japan
Spring 2014
Everyone knows this country and no one knows it. Here are twenty new Japans by its writers and artists, and by residents and visitors and neighbours. A special issue of Granta, published simultaneously in Japanese and English.
From this Issue
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Interior: Monkeyboy
Patrick Flanery
‘When I sleep, I dream of Will standing on our bed, flicking a whip against our faces. He draws blood.’
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Breakfast
Toshiki Okada
‘If I had known she were heading for Tokyo then, and if I had known she thought of Tokyo as a city of zombies, I would have wanted to know, of course, whether she saw me that way, too.’
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Variations on a Theme by Mister Donut
David Mitchell
‘But what if he answers in Martian? I’ll die.’
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Linked
Ruth Ozeki
‘old poems, like polished stones, / tumbled words to break my teeth on.’
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Things Remembered and Things Forgotten
Kyoko Nakajima
It was something Takashi remembered but Masaru had forgotten.
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The Japanese Firefly Squid
Kimiko Hahn
‘nothing like an ancient corridor where a / woman is stripped of resistance.’
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Spider Lilies
Hiroko Oyamada
‘The breeze smelled of many things: autumn and earth, the green of the countryside, face powder and old age.’
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Out of Ark
Yumiko Utsu
‘How long has it been since Noah and his passengers set off in their vessel?’
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The Beauty of the Package
Pico Iyer
‘You can throw yourself into any fantasy, she (and her country) might have been saying, so long as you don’t mistake it for real life.’
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After the War, Before the War
David Peace
‘At last, at last. His first steps, on Chinese soil.’
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From Site
Daisuke Yokota
‘The photograph we are left with and the memory of that time do not progress along the same time axes.’
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Arrival Gates
Rebecca Solnit
‘It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge.’
