translated by Jesse Kirkwood
 
“Though we’ve never actually gone and stood in front of her little stage, we like to sit here at the window like this, peeking over and listening in.
 
Two stories that consider the slipperiness of memory, partnerships, loss, and the stories men and women tell each other. The first features a female storyteller who continues to narrate tales as a form of blessing for her and her husband, who she has since lost. The second is the story of an older man remembering his lost wife – focusing on the old photographs he has of her, which he keeps looking through.
 
--
 
Takiguchi Yusho was born in Tokyo in 1982 and raised in neighbouring Saitama. He writes stories about individual and collective memory, marked by a roaming, omniscient narrative voice and multiple temporalities. In 2011, he was awarded the Shincho Prize for New Writers for his novella Gakki. In 2015, he won the Noma Literary New Face Prize for Ai to Jinsei and was awarded the 154th Akutagawa Ryunosuke Award for Shindeinaimono in 2016. In 2022, he won the 39th Oda Sakunosuke Award for for his novel Suiheisen, and the next year he was awarded 73rd Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Art Encouragement.
 
Jesse Kirkwood is a literary translator from the UK working from Japanese and French into English. The recipient of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize for his rendering of Yūshō Takiguchi’s short story ‘Nocturne’, his translations include Tokyo Express (Penguin, 2022) by Seichō Matsumoto, A Perfect Day to Be Alone (MacLehose, 2024) by Nanae Aoyama, and Sympathy Tower Tokyo (Viking, 2025) by Rie Qudan. Jesse grew up in a remote corner of England’s Lake District, studied in Oxford and London, and now lives in Japan.