The Word Book

by Mieko Kanai, Paul McCarthy (Translator)

Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in this collection shows an entirely different facet when viewed from a different angle. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction—the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things to one another—Mieko Kanai creates a reality where nothing is certain, and where a little boy going out to run errands for his mother might find that he’s an adult, and his mother long dead, at the end of a single train ride. Using precise language to describe dreamlike plots owing as much to Kafka and Barthelme as to Kenzaburō Ōe and the long tradition of the Japanese folktale of the macabre, The Word Book is an unforgettable voyage to absurd, hilarious, and terrifying locales, and is the English-language debut for one of the greatest and most interesting Japanese writers working today.

Genres: Japan, Short Stories, Fiction, Japanese Literature, Asia, Womens, 20th Century

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Mieko Kanai (金井 美恵子 Kanai Mieko?, born November 3, 1947 in Takasaki) is a Japanese writer of fiction, especially short stories, as well as poetry. She is also a literary critic.

Mieko Kanai read widely in fiction and poetry from an early age. In 1967, at the young age of twenty, she was runner-up for the Dazai Osamu Prize for Ai no seikatsu (A Life of Love), and the following year she received the Gendaishi Techo Prize for poetry. While maintaining a certain distance from literary circles and journalism, she has built up her own world of fiction with a sensual style. Along with her fiction, her criticism, which shows off her scathing, acid insight, has a devoted following.

Reviews

[Sebastián · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short stories that radically transform details of mundanity (waiting for a train, going to get milk) by forcing us to reconsider time, identity, and the medium of prose itself. Almost every work is bewitching in its own way, but together they challenge the form of "short story collection" by not only complementing and contrasting each other in tone and topic, but in the way that certain moments, whether a tiny sensuous detail or a whole subjectivity, break free from their stories and persist subtly and affectingly throughout the book, turning it some ways into a playfully, often painfully fragmented novel. I say painful because of the waves and surges that assaulted me with the violence that only the very best writing can achieve: this is prose with spears and daggers of brilliance unexpectedly embedded in its web of impressions. Loved it.

[Carl Lavigne · Rating 4 out of 5]

not entirely sure what i read, but 100% sure it made me sad.

[Fraser Simons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic bits of writing that are thematically interlinked, conflate or playfully, artfully distinguish between the person consuming the written word and the person who wrote it. Borges-esk at times in its fluidity in moving from story to story without typical framing to alter the readers perspective of the narrator, using their inbuilt assumptions.

Major themes are grounded in memory and the act of writing, but it ranges broadly on that theme and often in surprising ways. A character’s reliability can be called into question at any given time, and the character may be the author. And the author could be a woman calling the author, complaining about a “bad” piece of writing that was published. There is a frustration, it feels like, with the way people internalize stories and what that act then reflects in the author. And the inability of people to reckon with the notion of two completely separate selves performing the act of writing and reading. Mix that with the fragility and subjectivity of memory and a kind of awe in the verisimilitude and you get a pretty unique style of writing.

It’s always engaging and very artful. It very much feels like an artist displaying their craft. The prose, especially with first person does feel slightly formal—I’m wondering if that is due to translation or due to the time period, as it is a collection and she has been writing for quite some time. Anyway, the stories went in delightful directions and were moving.

“You were looking at the moon, weren’t you?”

[Bill Hsu · Rating 2 out of 5]

From the description, I was expecting quirky short stories with uncanny elements (right up my alley). I'm not sure what to make of this. "Fiction" for example has several POV switches between first and third person, the last mid-paragraph. It's not clear whether the same character is involved. The writing is reasonably engaging, though I'm not sure much of it is sticking with me.

There are also some odd word choices in the translation. The translator seems very fond of "cavil".

[Stefania · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The Word Book" is a collection of short stories which took me ages to read because of their unreadability. The stories seem like a stream of consciousness of multiple people who are really nobody. Most stories are about time, existence and mundane experiences which seem life changing to the character featured in the story. The narrative voice is distant in a very self conscious way...the confusion of being which the stories are about is made clear by abrubtly changing the narrative point of view: at times the same sentence starts with an "I" and suddenly changes in a "he" while speaking of the same situation and the same one person. This makes both the narrator and the story nihilistic: like they're trying to cancel each other. It's definitely not a light read and very much confusing. The last 3 stories draw elements of each other...one finds repeated sentences, or the same experiences described differently, from different points in time across the 3 stories.

[linz · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

"The curious illusion that I may still have something to write about seems to keep me bound to the act of writing" (87)

surrealist collection of short stories that i picked up in Chicago during a visit to Exile in Bookville with shizah for senior week 2024. not an easy read—Kanai's writing is a masterclass in stream of consciousness, jumping between perspectives within the same page, sometimes the same paragraph or sentence. her stories always return to a foundation built on dreams and memories and fiction, ephemeral in nature, and her writing reflects that slipperiness of time, except for certain sharp moments of clarity, when she crystalizes a fragment of reality: a peach that rots under your finger, and a video of a boy drinking milk the way his mother used to.

[Alice Jennings · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love love love this book. Feminist author of 1970s who wrote fantastic pieces in stream of consciousness. Half her stories are about the relationship between the author and reader, and the others are filled with blood, guts, and women using their submissive roles to trick men.
Well written, easy to read and not just for women! Written from the male perspective, Kanai does not make men look weak, rather she demonstrates how power can corrupt any gender if it is absolute. A female Raymond Carver in terms of style. Any budding authors should take a gander. The stories are short and powerful.
My only critic is this book does not include some of her best work such as 'Rotting Meat' and 'Rabbits'.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wasn't really sure what to rate this. All day I've been bouncing between a three and a five, so four seems like a good rating. It's a great collection and Kanai is an excellent writer.

I suppose I don't have a lot to say here. Some of the stories are truly excellent and peculiar in an awesome way. Others are sort of a miss for me, but I'd say it's well worth a read.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the truly great reading discoveries. This book will rank with a handful of books--Beckett, Rulfo, and Schulz come to mind--as revolutionary. I will be rereading it many times.

[lyell bark · Rating 4 out of 5]

half these short stories were about sitting on the train. ttrains ftw

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

short stories like dreams

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

supposedly from the borges/godard herd, but i felt it typical japanese style of everyday ordinariness until.........

[Phil · Rating 1 out of 5]

The first story was good, but I wasn't able to get into any of the others.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was the family custom to go to the movies together once a week, on Saturday afternoon, and he was wild about them. The lions, who showed the bright red inside of their mouths when they roared, and the horses and blue skies and ocean—all these mysteries appearing on the screen of the darkened movie theater as light and shadows of black and white thrilled him. When the circus came to a nearby park and he saw the feeble reality of a live lion (the fur at the base of its tail had fallen out from some skin disease) and the laziness that is the basic characteristic of a real lion, he was deeply disappointed. When he went into the theater from the street whose asphalt was melting in the strong afternoon sunlight—“the darkness of night was there, another darkness within the darkness, another night within the night, countless nights and days were there. After several days, or several years, or several centuries, he emerged into the street, dim in the long summer twilight, breathed into his lungs the sundry odors of the town mingled with the cool air, and felt the sensation of the still-warm asphalt through the rubber soles of his sneakers.” [40]

I knew, of course, that poets write their poems by inlaying (or interweaving) the words of others, and I had read Yoshioka’s poem with a kind of thrilled interest. The words quoted in brackets in the poem were ones that I had once written—yet that fact seemed lacking in reality, which made me feel somehow free, liberated. To put it more simply, I experienced an infinitely sweet joy at those words being set free from the spell that intones “I have written this.” I had the sense that there was no need to test the flavor of those words; that the meanings I had tried to give them had vanished; that the words came before me as naked objects, purified anew. [81]

c.f. Borges, Schultz, Kafka, Murakami, a blender

[Stephen Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Never mind. There's no one to cavil at this." There are twelve narratives in Mieko Kanai's "The Word Book" (translated). The narratology is diegetic if not exclusively so of any mimesis of action and sense reality of categories. Unlike the frame stories of Scheherazade, tales which have for us for so long freshly woven in and out of delights of fantasy and allure, in the legerdemain of surviving or postponing the night of après-lovemaking of her execution, Kanai's do not pretend to a narrator-preserving aim but perhaps rather seizes, or tries to anyway, upon every chance at erasing the narrator who can be as lost in it as any reading by feeling for the stones across the night's river fording. A phenomenology is at work in the reflexive storytelling that does not quite verge into the existentialist. So it proceeds not at all to startle in any particularly absurd way if one might consider a more intricate process unfolds for, or rather folds in, the reader in and out of tight intimate spaces where plenty more in infinite time ought and indeed do happen -- like at such a painting by Joan Miró. As one reads the surrealisms of the legible, what frivolity to bring to bear the illegibilities of one's reading for cavilling in, but if a button has been lost it is the gap in the buttonhole that suggests the place of neither's buttoning.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

You’ll have to really want to read something like this to enjoy it. Metatextual to metaphysical, blurring the line between fiction and essay; between short story and novel. Blurring age, perspective, timeline, Mieko Kanai’s collection is an exciting find. Her prose swirls steadily from the page and then explodes. Then, pink dust snows back onto the page and vanishes. Nobody will believe me when I tell them this, but I know it is true because some of the dust tickled my nostrils just before the last time you sneezed.

[Nick]

Teeny tiny stories that are as trippy as they are pretty. Uncanny, eerie, absurd—maybe in the same lineage as Borges? But with a lighter touch. Regardless of how to describe it, I'd highly recommend this little book. An instant favorite for me.

[Nata · Rating 3 out of 5]

my (very loose) ranking of the short stories:
the rose tango
vague departure
the time of one’s life
fiction
the moon
kitchen plays
rivals
windows
the voice
picnic
the voice of spring
the boundary line

[Magpie · Rating 1 out of 5]

A single ⭐️. The Word Book held some promise, and if you like poetical, self absorbed musings that feel like a snake eating its own tail, then you’ll love it
M 2022

[Rose Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

No idea what I just read, but I can say it was very beautifully written and poetic. It just left me feeling very hopeless.

[Selamawit · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love books that play with your sense of time and narrative structure. This was so cool and sometimes confusing but I think that was part of the point.

[Claire Torak · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5/5)

[sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

our school library has this underrated gem 😫

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories about art from the perspective of its creation. Particularly writing about writing, and living by writing.

[Sadie · Rating 5 out of 5]

finished it on auto scroll habang naghihiwalay lumpia wrapper

[bhen adrecra · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a weird little book. What a weird, wonderful little book.

Allow me to start again: Dream. Dream. Dream. It is 3am. I haven't slept. I have been reading through the dream journal that is Mieko Kanai's The Word Book. It is not a literal dream journal; it is a book of short stories. A book of short stories which, when read together in one sitting in the depths of the night, run together to form a whole. Phrases repeat and ideas, images, double back on themselves. Characters move in and out of focus.

I almost did not buy the book at all. Allow me to explain: I was in a book shop in Ikebukuro. I like Ikebukuro only a little bit, and this is why: in the main shopping street, smoky jazz plays eternally through speakers in the streetlamps, allowing you—if you are of such a persuasion—to imagine yourself as a character in a Raymond Chandler novel. I am very much of this persuasion.

So, the bookshop, then. I took down The Word Book from the shelves because I liked the title, The Word Book. The cover blurb references Kafka, Oē, and Borges. Sold. But not quite. Flicking through the book and reading a few passages, I see the word ceasing. It was placed in the sentence thusly: 'He thought about photographs almost without ceasing for a moment'. I did not enjoy this sentence. I placed the book back on the shelf, blaming a perhaps poor translation

Instead, I bought Sartre's Being and Nothingness for ¥150. That book is near 800 pages. ¥150 for all those thoughts. What a world. I left the bookshop and wandered back outside into a Chandler mystery, waiting for an email which never came

Something about The Word Book nagged at me, perhaps the references on the back cover or that many of the stories themselves seemed to take place on trains. I returned to the bookshop and bought it without thinking thrice. On the train home I read the first few stories; they were strange and abstruse. The later stories were too; playing previous sentences like leitmotifs, and building upon them, word by word, sentence by sentence. The stories changed from first person to third person, often within paragraphs. This is explained away yet the resulting explanation yields more questions of its own. No matter. Who questions the logic of a dream. No one, that is who. Not at least until the dreamer has awoke and spent half the day thinking on other things then how is it that the spectacles I am wearing today were in the childhood home I have not visited for twenty years [if, for example, your dreams are very boring]. Already I was thinking of rereading the book while still reading it for the first time

In my room I have a pile of ever-thickening philosophy tomes I will never read my way through, promising, though they do, some kind of truths for this tough little life. I put Being and Nothingness on the pile and continued to read The Word Book all night, until the very last page. I liked it a lot. At this moment in my life, it seems, I would rather have dreams than realities

[Sandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up on a whim at the Gothic Bookshop, thinking it would be nice to have some short stories for a trip. I started it at the very beginning of November, and despite the fact that each of the stories is quite short and the volume itself is barely over 100 pages, it took me over a month to finish.

Part of it, I think, was that I wasn't really prepared to read it - I've ready essentially no Japanese fiction, didn't do my homework about the author, and also didn't have the time to sit down and read it in one or two long sessions.

I didn't much care for the book - the idea behind it (examining the different psychologies of being an author) is fascinating, and each of the stories had an interesting moment or two, but every.single.story seemed the same to me, and by the third or fourth go-round, the point of departure seemed tired.

It'd be interesting to take apart a single story, perhaps, or chat it over in a book group, but as a book to work through in short snippets on my own, it wasn't a very enjoyable read.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times I was reminded of Queneau's Exercises in Style or the Zukofsky poem in which the poet takes a line from Shakespeare and works through the permutations of its word order, over and over. Here, as I see it from my first reading, the antecedents of pronouns seem to be playing a game of musical chairs. Or, to pull in another strained comparison, the effect of reading this is at times like staring at a figure/ground illusion, your construal of what you see ponging back and forth, back and forth.

[C. Lee Hodges · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impenetrable collection of "short stories" that has turned out to be the longest 140 pages I have ever read. Only reason I am not rating lower is that I recognize I may be missing something culturally and the possibility something gets lost in translation. Though I am doubting either is the case...

Maybe some day I can give this a shot in the native Japanese, but if I ever follow through with learning Japanese, my list of untranslated want-to-reads is already long enough.

[Oliver Ho · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and very odd collection of short stories...or is it rather a linked collection of stories...or maybe it's actually a novel? Dreamlike, poetic, hypnotic, it reminded me at times of Murakami, Auster, Borges, while also feeling utterly unique. It's not mainstream, linear fiction, and I will definitely read this again.