Books
Manazuru
A Novel
Startlingly restless and immaculately compact, Manazuru paints the portrait of a woman on the brink of her own memories and future.Twelve years have passed since Kei’s husband, Rei, disappeared and she was left alone with her three–year–old daughter. Her new relationship with a married man—the antithesis of Rei—has brought her life to a numbing stasis, and her relationships with her mother and daughter have spilled into routine, day after day. Kei begins making repeated trips to the seaside town of Manazuru, a place that jogs her memory to a moment in time she can never quite locate. Her time there by the water encompasses years of unsteady footing and a developing urgency to find something.
Through a poetic style embracing the surreal and grotesque, a quiet tenderness emerges from these dark moments. Manazuru is a meditation on memory—a profound, precisely delineated exploration of the relationships between lovers and family members.
First Snow on Fuji
The stories of Yasunari Kawabata evoke an unmistakably Japanese atmosphere in their delicacy, understatement, and lyrical description. Like his later works, First Snow on Fuji is concerned with forms of presence and absence, with being, with memory and loss of memory, with not–knowing. Kawabata lets us slide into the lives of people who have been shattered by war, loss, and longing. These stories are beautiful and melancholy, filled with Kawabata's unerring vision of human psychology. First Snow on Fuji was originally published in Japan in 1958, ten years before Kawabata received the Nobel Prize. Kawabata selected the stories for this collection himself, and the result is a stunning assembly of disparate moods and genres. This new edition is the first to be published in English.
Catapult | Counterpoint | Soft Skull
20 Jay Street #704
Brooklyn, NY 11201
646.926.0805 | contact@catapult.co