We, the Children of Cats

"The loosely linked stories collected in We, the Children of Cats home in on everyday events of millennial Japan only to slowly pan out onto alternate realities--voyages, crimes of passion, cultural histories of treason, sudden quarrels and equally sudden truces. Bergstrom and Fraser's translations brilliantly capture the emotional tones and shape-shifting nature of Hoshino's language. These stories explore the longing to be somewhere, sometime, or even someone else so strongly that reality itself is, before you know it, transfigured."
--Anne McKnight, Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA, author of Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity

"I see [in Hoshino] an ability to truly think through fiction that recalls Kobo Abe. This superlative ability makes even the most fantastical details and developments read as perfectly natural."
--Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize winning author of Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids and Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness

"These wonderful stories make you laugh and cry, but mostly they astonish, co-mingling daily reality with the envelope pushed to the max and the interstice of the hard edges of life with the profoundly gentle ones."
--Helen Mitsios, editor of New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan and Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan

"Like a heat shimmer on a summer's day, Hoshino Tomoyuki's stories tantalize and haunt. From 'Paper Woman' to 'A Milonga for the Melted Moon, ' Hoshino writes of people stranded between poles of reality and dream--with each option as uncertain as the other. Wonderfully translated, selected, and presented, this collection of works will be required reading."
--Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis, author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan and translator of Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

"What feels most striking and praiseworthy about Hoshino's work is how he deals with ambiguity--not as a fusion of multiple meanings, nor as their simple coexistence, nor as symbolic of meaning's absence; rather, he deftly weaves these concepts together and then, in the space between them, makes his escape."
--Maki Kashimada, award-winning author of Love at 6000 Degrees and The Kingdom of Zero