At The Edge Of The Woods Masatsugu Ono Juliet Winters Carpenter Translation by Masatsugu Ono, Juliet Winters Carpenter (translation), Akhil Sharma (foreword) 9781949641288, 1949641287 instant download after payment.

When his wife returns to her parents' house to have their 2nd child, an unnamed narrator & his son are left to manage by themselves. Instead of absence, what the father & son begin to notice is a strange noise opening up between them, reverberating through their home, their television set, & the books they read at night. The wood outside their home hums with it, too: leaves fall from branches which are already naked, trees wriggle when walked past, & the hills on the horizon rise & fall in a building rhythm. 

Ono's stories teeter on the edge of something unsayable, exploring repetition & contradiction to sketch compelling, otherworldly characters. The strange sound which hums through the twinned narratives is distilled in Carpenter's translation, which masterfully employs the rhythms & echoes of the English language to convey Ono's sense that something is coughing, laughing, turning under the words on the page.

Design by Nigel Aono-Billson.

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An allegory for alienation & climate catastrophe unlike any other

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 & Resistance fighters fell. When the mother, fearing another miscarriage, returns to her family’s home to give birth to a 2nd child, father & 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 & 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.