読書で離婚を考えた。

by Toh EnJoe

夫婦のかたちに正解はない。本の読み方にも正解はない。芥川賞作家の夫とホラー作家の妻の、ハラハラするやりとりを覗き見ながら、読みたい本に出会える類まれなる書!夫婦でお互いに本を勧め合って、読書感想文を交換しあえば、いまよりもっと相互理解が進み、仲良くなるのでは――? そんな思いで始まった、芥川賞作家・円城塔とホラー作家・田辺青蛙の夫婦読書リレー。『羆嵐』『VOWやもん! 』『クジョー』『台所のおと』『黄昏流星群』などなど、妻から夫へ、夫から妻へと課題図書が指定されるたびに、なぜか雰囲気はどんどん険悪に。相手の意図をはかりかね、慣れない本に右往左往、レビューに四苦八苦。作家夫婦のコミュニケーションはなんだかちょっと変だけど、夫婦の格闘の軌跡を覗き見ながら、読みたい本も見つかる画期的な一冊。

Paperback Bunko

About the author

Toh EnJoe (Japanese: 円城 塔 Hepburn: Enjō Tō, pen name) (born September 15, 1972) is a Japanese author. His works are usually literary fiction, speculative fiction or science fiction.

Born in 1972 in Sapporo, he graduated from the physics department of Tohoku University, then went on to the graduate school at University of Tokyo and received Ph.D. for a mathematical physical study on the natural languages. He worked as a post-doc researcher at several research institutes for seven years, then abandoned the academic career in 2007 and found a programmer job at a software firm (resigns in 2008 to become a full-time writer).

In 2006, he submitted Self-Reference ENGINE to a science-fiction novel contest Komatsu Sakyō Award. Although it did not win the award (none did in this year), it was published from Hayakawa Shobō in 2007. At almost same time, his short story Obu za bēsbōru ("Of The Baseball") won the contest of literary magazine Bungakukai, which became his debut in literary fiction.[3]

His literary fictions are often dense with allusions. Labyrinthine annotations were added to "Uyūshitan" when it was published in book form in 2009, where there were none when published initially in literary magazine. Often, his science fiction works take motif from mathematics. The narrator of "Boy's Surface" (2007) is a morphism, and the title is a reference to a geometrical notion. In "Moonshine" (2009), natural numbers are sentient through a savant's mind's eye in a field of the monster group.

Project Itoh's Genocidal Organ was also a finalist of Komatsu Sakyō Award contest and published from Hayakawa Shobō in 2007, along with Enjoe's Self-Reference ENGINE. Since then they often appeared together at science fiction conventions and interviews, and collaborated in a few works, until Itoh's death of cancer in 2009.
At the press conference after the announcement of Enjoe's Akutagawa Prize in January 2012, he revealed the plan to complete Itoh's unfinished novel Shisha no teikoku. It was published in August 2012, and received the Special Award of Nihon SF Taisho.