The fiery, beguiling stories in Taeko Kōno’s collection Toddler Hunting and Other Stories are vertiginous tightrope walks between two planes of reality ... These stories have no interest in closure, not even oblique closure. Like those of many other good short stories, the ending of a Kōno story is narratively definitive. (A story can be ruined by stopping too early or too late; good stories have a sense of exactly when they become narratively definitive.) But somewhere right before the end, the story has taken a sharp, dizzying turn, so that when it finally lands, it is in a place that is not merely surprising and inevitable but on a different plane entirely, one removed from the established reality. The effect is profoundly unsettling. When I think of a Taeko Kōno story, I picture a glass filling with liquid. As the story reaches its end, the glass is filled to the brim. But in the final moment, the liquid spills over the side and lands on the surface below. That new plane, something that we hadn’t even considered before, is now—surprisingly yet inevitably—stained ... Kōno’s writing is shocking, ominous, and subversive; it lays bare the destruction and the renewal that freedom and desire can cause.

Taeko who? She ought to be better known, and in Japan, she is. Beginning with the 1961 story that lends the 'new' collection Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories its title, the Osaka-born Kono established herself there as one of the most radically talented authors of her generation, a writer’s writer whose often épater work was hailed for its spark and originality by figures as unlike her as Kenzaburo Oe and Shusaku Endo ... There is plenty of suspense, delayed and deferred, in Kono’s stories, which nevertheless refuse anything resembling a tidy ending. In fact, she often opts to end her stories with resonant but gnomic parting scenes and strikingly disjointed images, like the 'writhing mass' of black insects covering a slice of raw meat that mesmerizes the disturbed lawyer in 'Ants Swarm.'

An intriguing new voice is introduced in this selection of Kono Taeko’s stories written in the 1960s. Most focus on middle-class women in their thirties, married, but with no children. Although firmly rooted in the realist tradition, the stories have a surreal, dreamlike quality ... All the stories display a highly developed visual sense that gives them a cinematic quality and may remind readers of the work of other Japanese authors, such as Abe Kobe.

[Kono's] stories are plainspoken, realistic and often pedestrian in their descriptions of day-to-day life, which make the sudden intrusions of violence and perversion both more startling and more transgressive ... Two currents are constantly crossing in the stories, the first depicting the polite forms of public interactions and the second pulsing with taboo fantasies and hallucinations. There are resonances here with Japan’s greatest midcentury writer Junichiro Tanizaki, who explored sexual fetishes in novels... But the subversions feel somehow scarier in Kono’s case, in part because of her deadpan prose and in part because she strikes at sacred paradigms of motherhood and femininity. The scenes frequently have the feel of horror stories.

Shifts from exterior persona to interior desire rupture Kono’s cold prose, shocking the reader out of socially normative interactions and thrusting them into the taboos lurking deep inside, followed by a quick return to her straight-faced writing. This keeps readers on their toes, not knowing when the next rupture will occur ... The translations read naturally and instill in the reader the intended confusion, shock, and awe that arises from the contrasting play of interior and exterior in the original ... It’s a shame that more of Kono Taeko’s work has not been translated into English. Upon reading this collection, I was left thirsting for more of the drama, passion, and exploration of taboo that she relates in these stories. There’s a rawness in these stories that leaves the reader feeling bare, visible, and reflective ... Whether you strictly follow societal gender roles or break the mold with taboos like the ones presented in the work, Kono’s prose will leave you feeling exposed.

There is a moment in the collection’s penultimate story, Conjurer, when the protagonist, Hisako, thinks back to a fight she witnessed between her married friends ...'They’d been forced to acknowledge something in each of them and also something about their very relationship that they’d been unconsciously avoiding, and, forced to become aware of it, they felt betrayed.' This moment shines a light backward on the rest of the collection: Kono’s specialty is this avoidance of the unconscious and the moments when the darkness of her characters’ psyches finally spills out ... Kono...structures most of her stories similarly, with an unsettling flashback at the center of a story told in chronological time to show the ways that the dark seeds of our actions are planted, often unwittingly. And though the structures of the stories repeat and the protagonists resemble each other, each story unburies something that feels both thrillingly specific and surprisingly contemporary ... Kono should be an electrifying discovery for English-speaking lovers of short fiction.

This collection from Kono, one of Japan’s most prestigious writers, features stories written throughout the 1960s that are both provocative and eerily moving in their confrontation of the terrifying and the taboo ... Each of Kono’s stories features characters confronting new ways to live with their own secret selves, resulting in a strikingly original and surprising collection.