At the Edge of the Woods

"Balances wonder and disquiet with incomparable grace and precision...Ono continues to captivate." --Bryan Washington, author of Memorial

In an unnamed foreign country, a family of three is settling into a house at the edge of the woods. But something is off. A sound, at first like coughing and then like laughter, emanates from the nearby forest. Fantastical creatures, it is said, live out there in a castle where feudal lords reigned and Resistance fighters fell. When the mother, fearing another miscarriage, returns to her family's home to give birth to a second child, father and son are left to their own devices in rural isolation. Haunted by the ever-present woods, they look on as the TV flashes with floods and processions of refugees. The boy brings a mysterious half-naked old woman home, but before the father can make sense of her presence, she disappears. A mail carrier with gnashing teeth visits to deliver nothing but gossip of violence. A tree stump in the yard refuses to die, no matter how generously the poison is applied.

An allegory for alienation and climate catastrophe unlike any other, At the Edge of the Woods is a psychological tale where myth and fantasy are not the dominion of childhood innocence but the poison fruit borne of the paranoia and violence of contemporary life.

About the Author
Ono, Masatsugu: - Masatsugu Ono is the author of numerous novels, including Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave), which won the Asahi Award for New Writers, and Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune (Echo on the Bay, Two Lines Press, 2020), which won the Mishima Prize. A prolific translator from the French--including works by Èdouard Glissant and Marie NDiaye--Ono received the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary honor, in 2015. He lives in Tokyo.Winters Carpenter, Juliet: - Juliet Winters Carpenter was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1948. She is a veteran translator and double recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission for the Translation of Japanese Literature, in 1980 for Abe Kōbō's Secret Rendezvous and in 2014 for Minae Mizumura's A True Novel. In addition to numerous works on Japanese culture and religion, she has translated fiction by authors such as Enchi Fumiko, Tawara Machi, Watanabe Shin'ichi, Miyabe Miyuki, Shiba Ryōtarō, Miura Shion, and Hirano Keiichirō. With Aotani Yüko, she edited the bilingual book Gems of Japanese Literature/ Eigo rōdoku de tanoshimu Nihon bungaku. A professor emerita of Doshisha Women's College, she lives with her husband on Whidbey Island in Washington State.