fiction, Taeko Kono writes with a disquieting and strange beauty, always foregrounding what Choice called “the great power of serious, indeed shocking events.” In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls, but she compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. The impersonal gaze Taeko Kono turns on this behavior transfixes the reader with a fatal question: What are we hunting for? And why? Now available in paperback for the first time, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories should fascinate any reader interested in Japanese literature––or in the growing world of transgressive fiction.

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