Masatsugu Ono and David Karashima: At the Edge of the Woods
4:30 pm PT | 5:30 pm MT | 6:30 pm CT | 7:30 pm ET
Virtual Event
Masatsugu Ono discusses his novel At the Edge of the Woods, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, with David Karashima, author of What We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami. Co-presented with Community Bookstore.
About At the Edge of the Woods
“An eerie allegory of climate apocalypse and unnatural nature…full of dark laughter, figures that appear and disappear, sounds of violence and gnashing teeth.” —The Millions (Most Anticipated Books of 2022)
“Balances wonder and disquiet with incomparable grace and precision…Ono continues to captivate.”
—Bryan Washington, author of Memorial
In an unnamed foreign country, a family of three is settling into a house at the edge of the woods. But something is off. A sound, at first like coughing and then like laughter, emanates from the nearby forest. Fantastical creatures, it is said, live out there in a castle where feudal lords reigned and Resistance fighters fell. When the mother, fearing another miscarriage, returns to her family’s home to give birth to a second child, father and son are left to their own devices in rural isolation. Haunted by the ever-present woods, they look on as the TV flashes with floods and processions of refugees. The boy brings a mysterious half-naked old woman home, but before the father can make sense of her presence, she disappears. A mail carrier with gnashing teeth visits to deliver nothing but gossip of violence. A tree stump in the yard refuses to die, no matter how generously the poison is applied.
An allegory for alienation and climate catastrophe unlike any other, At the Edge of the Woods is a psychological tale where myth and fantasy are not the dominion of childhood innocence but the poison fruit borne of the paranoia and violence of contemporary life.
Masatsugu Ono is the author of numerous novels, including Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave), which won the Asahi Award for New Writers, and Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune (Boat on a Choppy Bay), which won the Mishima Prize. A prolific translator from the French—including works by Èdouard Glissant and Marie NDiaye—Ono received the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s highest literary honor, in 2015. He lives in Tokyo.
David Karashima is associate professor of creative writing at Waseda University in Tokyo. He has translated a range of contemporary Japanese authors into English, including Hitomi Kanehara, Hisaki Matsuura, and Shinji Ishii. He coedited (with Elmer Luke) the anthology March Was Made of Yarn: Writers Respond to the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown and is co-editor (with Michael Emmerich) of Pushkin Press’s Contemporary Japanese Novellas series. His most recent book (in English) is Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami published by Soft Skull Press.