So We Look To The Sky A Novel Misumi Kubo Polly Barton Translation by Misumi Kubo, Polly Barton (translation) 9781951627935, 1951627938, 2021933411 instant download after payment.

Sexually explicit & searingly honest, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begins with an affair between a student & a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex at a comics convention. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman's husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages & hardships ordinary people face. 

A teenager experimenting with sex & then, perhaps, experiencing love & loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she & her husband cannot conceive; a high-school girl, spurned by the student, realizing that being cute & fertile is all others expect of her; the student's best friend, who lives in the projects & is left alone to support & care for his voracious, senile grandmother; & the student's mother, a divorced single parent & midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world & must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation & loss, from giving up on his own.

Narrating each story in the distinctive voice of its protagonist, Misumi Kubo weaves themes including sex, love, the female body, gossip, & the bullying that leaves young people feeling burdened & helpless into a profoundly original novel that lingers in the mind for its affirmation of the raw, unquellable force of life.

Misumi Kubo won the R-18 Literature Prize in 2009 for the short story that became the first chapter of So We Look to the Sky, her debut novel, which won the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize, placed second in the voting for the Japan Booksellers' Award, & was a runaway bestseller