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しをかくうま
第45回野間文芸新人賞受賞作。
疾走する想像力で注目を集める新芥川賞作家が描く、馬と人類の壮大な歴史をめぐる物語。
太古の時代。「乗れ!」という声に導かれて人が初めて馬に乗った日から、驚異の物語は始まる。この出逢いによって人は限りなく遠くまで移動できるようになった――人間を“今のような人間”にしたのは馬なのだ。
そこから人馬一体の歴史は現代まで脈々と続き、しかしいつしか人は己だけが賢い動物であるとの妄想に囚われてしまった。
現代で競馬実況を生業とする、馬を愛する「わたし」は、人類と馬との関係を取り戻すため、そして愛する牝馬<しをかくうま>号に近づくため、両者に起こったあらゆる歴史を学ぼうと「これまで存在したすべての牡馬」たる男を訪ねるのだった――。
疾走する想像力で注目を集める新芥川賞作家が描く、馬と人類の壮大な歴史をめぐる物語。
太古の時代。「乗れ!」という声に導かれて人が初めて馬に乗った日から、驚異の物語は始まる。この出逢いによって人は限りなく遠くまで移動できるようになった――人間を“今のような人間”にしたのは馬なのだ。
そこから人馬一体の歴史は現代まで脈々と続き、しかしいつしか人は己だけが賢い動物であるとの妄想に囚われてしまった。
現代で競馬実況を生業とする、馬を愛する「わたし」は、人類と馬との関係を取り戻すため、そして愛する牝馬<しをかくうま>号に近づくため、両者に起こったあらゆる歴史を学ぼうと「これまで存在したすべての牡馬」たる男を訪ねるのだった――。
176 pages, Hardcover
First published March 12, 2024
2 people are currently reading
3 people want to read
About the author
Rie Qudan
5 books35 followersRie Qudan or Rie Kudan (九段理江) (born September 27, 1990, in Saitama, Japan) is a Japanese novelist. In 2024, Qudan won the 170th Akutagawa Prize for her novel Tōkyō-to Dōjō Tō[b] ("Tokyo Sympathy Tower"). She stated that about 5% of the novel was written by artificial intelligence.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 3, 2025
Now this was a weird one. Considering this novel's obsession with the idea of writing poetry, it makes sense to read this as a collection of poetic passages that are thinly strung together by some kind of narrative - that narrative being the protagonist's seeming self discovery? Though I'm not sure what he really discovers in the end besides affirming what he has already felt all along: a love for horses. This could be read sexually, of course, but it seems Kudan Rie attempts to portray something more than that, though without effacing that sexual element as well (explicitly referred to are horse genitalia and horse sex).
While intriguing to analyse, the novel feels like it is touching on too many ideas at once within its 172 pages, causing it to seem like a mega-novel that has somehow been truncated and compressed into a convenient form. Interesting, then, is the tension that this novel presents between such excessively ambitious mega-novels and more modest literary efforts. There is something to be said here about how the novel takes prior instances of extreme literature - Numa Shozo's Human Livestock Yapoo comes to mind - and boxes them tightly into that type of contemporary Japanese novel which I think might be emblematized by Murata Sayaka's Convenience Store Woman (itself a seeming performative commentary on the becoming-convenient of literature).
The novel also struck me as somewhat Pynchonian, especially with the weird ass names. Ooooooooookayama is the highlight here, and the passage where the protagonist argues about how the Japanese nation might be destroyed simply through the introduction of a horse with a name that is 10 Japanese characters long was pretty funny.
Though all this was interesting, I'm not sure if I quite enjoyed reading this (perhaps the peak of my enjoyment was just that aforementioned passage). It definitely was enjoyable from the context within which I was working through this (a reading group for studying Japanese literature), but this definitely isn't the kind of thing that I would read on my own time. So while offering me a lot of ideas in an intellectual sense (which makes this novel rather instrumental rather than something I would love of my own volition like the horses admired by the protagonist), I would have preferred something else.
Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies and Abe Kobo's Secret Rendezvous have some resonances in terms of the notion of horses.
While intriguing to analyse, the novel feels like it is touching on too many ideas at once within its 172 pages, causing it to seem like a mega-novel that has somehow been truncated and compressed into a convenient form. Interesting, then, is the tension that this novel presents between such excessively ambitious mega-novels and more modest literary efforts. There is something to be said here about how the novel takes prior instances of extreme literature - Numa Shozo's Human Livestock Yapoo comes to mind - and boxes them tightly into that type of contemporary Japanese novel which I think might be emblematized by Murata Sayaka's Convenience Store Woman (itself a seeming performative commentary on the becoming-convenient of literature).
The novel also struck me as somewhat Pynchonian, especially with the weird ass names. Ooooooooookayama is the highlight here, and the passage where the protagonist argues about how the Japanese nation might be destroyed simply through the introduction of a horse with a name that is 10 Japanese characters long was pretty funny.
Though all this was interesting, I'm not sure if I quite enjoyed reading this (perhaps the peak of my enjoyment was just that aforementioned passage). It definitely was enjoyable from the context within which I was working through this (a reading group for studying Japanese literature), but this definitely isn't the kind of thing that I would read on my own time. So while offering me a lot of ideas in an intellectual sense (which makes this novel rather instrumental rather than something I would love of my own volition like the horses admired by the protagonist), I would have preferred something else.
Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies and Abe Kobo's Secret Rendezvous have some resonances in terms of the notion of horses.
Displaying 1 of 1 review