A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network…
A young woman is walked home one night by a reclusive graduate student, then finds herself lured into an apartment full of eerie objects of Egyptian antiquity…
A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive…
At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, is mistaken for a French speaker and is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman putting off a visit to a psychiatrist finds herself in a taxi with an… (tovább)
A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network…
A young woman is walked home one night by a reclusive graduate student, then finds herself lured into an apartment full of eerie objects of Egyptian antiquity…
A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive…
At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, is mistaken for a French speaker and is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman putting off a visit to a psychiatrist finds herself in a taxi with an older man who shares his own revelations about the nature of loneliness; a depressed divorcee accepts a lunch invitation from a co-worker to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of others' company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’
