Dragon Palace
'How can a person resist?' — The Paris Review
Stories from a Japanese master of transformative fiction, where reality, myth and human foibles meet shifting dimensions of gender, biology and destiny.
From the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo comes this otherworldly collection of eight stories, each a masterpiece of transformation, infused with humour, sex and the universal search for love and beauty — in a world where the laws of time and space, and even species boundaries, don’t apply. Meet a shape-shifting con man, a goddess who uses sex to control her followers, an elderly man possessed by a fox spirit, a woman who falls in love with her 400-year-old ancestor, a kitchen god with three faces in a weasel-infested apartment block, moles who provide underground sanctuary for humans who have lost the will to live, a man nurtured through life by his seven extraordinary sisters, and a woman who is handed from husband to husband until she is finally able to return to the sea.
'Unique and attention-grabbing, Dragon Palace is a collection of open-ended fantasy tales about thwarted love and lost opportunities.' — Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews
Hiromi Kawakami is one of Japan’s most popular novelists. Many of her books have been published in English, including Manazuru, The Nakano Thrift Shop, Parade, Record of a Night Too Brief, Strange Weather in Tokyo (shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2013), and The Ten Loves of Nishino. People from My Neighborhood, translated by Ted Goossen, was published in 2020.
Ted Goossen is the editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories. He translated Haruki Murakami’s Wind/Pinball and The Strange Library, and co-translated (with Philip Gabriel) Men Without Women and Killing Commendatore.
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