Water, water everywhere: Touring the Land of the Dead, by Maki Kashimada, reviewed

Maki Kashimada won the 2012 Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, the strange, unsettling novella that makes up half of this volume. It is translated here for the first time from the Japanese into English by Haydn Trowell, alongside Kashimada’s ‘Ninety-nine Kisses’, a short story based on Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s classic novel about four unmarried women, The Makioka Sisters. In Japan, Kashimada has become known for her avant-garde, nonconformist style. These two offerings are exemplary pieces.

In Touring the Land of the Dead, a woman called Natsuko returns to a hotel she went to as a child with her mother and brother; now she is with her disabled husband, who suffers from seizures. They visit an onsen and the hotel’s salon; they eat in the restaurant; they go to the sea and take a footbath. In the present little happens; but the past returns to Natsuko in flashbacks.