(tent) Drowning

“Why is it that I can never say ‘I love you’ when it matters most?” Two people empty bottle after bottle of sake and stagger side by side through the darkness of night — “Swaying.” A woman drowns in desire with a no-good man, escaping ever further — “Drowning.” She longs for intimacy, but he slips through her grasp like smoke — “The Turkey.” With trembling tenderness, Hiromi Kawakami captures the fleeting moments of love — the clink of shared cups, the road walked together, the sea they leapt into as one. In these eight masterful short stories, love is obsessive, elusive, absurd, and sometimes transcendent — outliving even time itself. Includes: “The Crying Turtle,” “Pitiful,” “One Hundred Years,” “God Insect,” “Ignorance,” and more. Winner of the 2000 Women’s Literature Prize and the Itō Sei Literary Prize.