トリップ [Trip]

by Mitsuyo Kakuta, 角田光代

普通の人々が平凡に暮らす東京近郊の街。駆け落ちしそびれた高校生、クスリにはまる日常を送る主婦、パッとしない肉屋に嫁いだ主婦―。何となくそこに暮らし続ける何者でもないそれらの人々がみな、日常とはズレた奥底、秘密を抱えている。小さな不幸と小さな幸福を抱きしめながら生きる人々を、透明感のある文体で描く珠玉の連作小説。直木賞作家の真骨頂。

270 pages, Paperback

First published February 20, 2004

About the author

Mitsuyo Kakuta (角田光代, 1967–) set her sights on becoming a writer from an early age. Her debut novel—Kōfuku na yūgi (A Blissful Pastime), written while she was a university student—received the Kaien Prize for New Writers in 1990. She has been working continuously as an author ever since, never having had to support herself with a separate job. Three nominations for the Akutagawa Prize serve as a measure of the promise with which she was regarded from early in her career. Then, at the encouragement of an editor, she shifted toward the entertainment end of the literary spectrum, where she garnered a much broader readership with works depicting the lives of women in her generation, from their mid-thirties to forties. After publishing two brilliant novels in 2002, Ekonomikaru paresu (Economical Palace) and Kūchū teien (Hanging Garden), she went on to win the Naoki Prize for the second half of 2004 with Woman on the Other Shore (tr. 2007). Her successes continued with The Eighth Day (tr. 2010), which received the 2007 Chūō Kōron Literary Prize and was made into a televised drama series as well as a movie; the book sold more than a million copies, vaulting her into the ranks of Japan's best-selling authors. In 2012 she added to her list of honors by earning the Shibata Renzaburō Award for her novel Kami no tsuki (Paper Moon), and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for her volume of short stories Kanata no ko (The Children Beyond).

Mitsuyo Kakuta is currently working on translating the Tale of Genji into modern Japanese.
(source: BooksFromJapan.jp)