The fiery, beguiling stories in Taeko Kōno’s collection Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, translated by Lucy North, are vertiginous tightrope walks between two planes of reality. Kōno (1926–2015) wrote these stories between 1961 and 1969, when several Japanese women writers were poking holes in the long-held idea that a wife is defined in relation to her husband and is submissive to him. (See also, for instance, the stories “Lingering Affection,” by Jakucho Setouchi, and “Luminous Watch,” by Setsuko Tsumura, both of them excellent.) It wasn’t until 1945 that women in Japan had been granted the right to vote, and not until the new constitution of 1946 that women had been allowed to ask for a divorce and public schools made coeducational.

To illustrate what makes Kōno’s stories unforgettable, it’s useful to think about how a story can potentially end. Imagine, for example, a story about a married, childless couple driving across the state for a short weekend vacation in the seaside town where they met. The wife is trying to work up the resolve to tell the husband she doesn’t want to be married anymore; the husband has no idea. The wife knows that the further they get into the trip, the more difficult the situation becomes. In one potential ending, the wife waits until they’re walking on the beach to tell him, and he drives off without her. In another, she doesn’t tell him at all, and they drive home, the husband content and oblivious, listening to classical music on the radio. Both endings are narratively definitive—readers know all they need to know for the story to end (the wife either chooses to voice her feelings or she doesn’t). The first ending is also factually definitive—readers know exactly what’s going to happen plot-wise after the final period (the husband has left her and she must make her way back home). But the second ending isn’t factually definitive: the wife hasn’t articulated how she feels, and the thing is still silently between them, maybe growing, maybe not. Still, in both endings, readers know what the finale means for the reality of the wife.

Toddler Hunting, on the other hand, doesn’t let us off this easy. These stories have no interest in closure, not even oblique closure. Like those of many other good short stories, the ending of a Kōno story is narratively definitive. (A story can be ruined by stopping too early or too late; good stories have a sense of exactly when they become narratively definitive.) But somewhere right before the end, the story has taken a sharp, dizzying turn, so that when it finally lands, it is in a place that is not merely surprising and inevitable but on a different plane entirely, one removed from the established reality. The effect is profoundly unsettling.

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