Showing results by author "Polly Barton - translator" in All Categories

WINNER OF THE AKUTAGAWA PRIZE 'This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed' Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police 'Here we find a form of language that attempts to venture, dancing, into a past enveloped in silence' Yoko Tawada, author of The Last Children of Tokyo 'An eerie, shimmering fever dream . . .

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.