The Shooting Gallery and Other Stories

by Yuko Tsushima, Geraldine Harcourt (Translator)

Overview

The eight powerful stories of The Shooting Gallery examine the lives of single women coping with motherhood, passion, jealousy, and the tug-of-war between responsibility and entrapment.

An unwed mother arranges for her children to meet their father, who is a stranger to them. A woman confronts the “other woman” in her lover’s life. A young single mother on an outing to the seaside comes face to face with how much she resents her own children. Another woman tries desperately to hold on to a private life despite her controlling male relatives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811213561
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/17/1997
Series:	New Directions Classic
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	288,601
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.50(d)

Table of Contents

A Sensitive Season

South Wind
The Silent Traders
The ChrysanthemumBeetle
Missing
The Shooting Gallery
Clearing the Thickets
An Embrace

Editorial Reviews

"[Tsushima’s heroines share a] hopeless, level gaze which sees everything, the ability (in spite of having seen everything) to go ahead, eyes on the road–it takes a very special and very personal talent to so convincingly display this….[And] here Tsushima has finally found something like perfection in this imperfect world–Geraldine Harcourt’s translations. After the first page, one completely forgets that it is, indeed, a translation one is reading."

The Japan Times - Donald Richie

"Tsushima is a subtle, surprising, elegant writer who courageously tells unexpected truths about an unfamiliar, yet recognizable world."

Margaret Drabble

"As potent and heady as a dry martini….Tsushima is an archaeologist of the female psyche, reconstructing the burnt nerve endings underneath unprepossessing female exteriors."

The Village Voice

"These are stories that cut deeply, and remain etched into your memory long after the last page. Largely billed as a feminist writer, Tsushima evades any label, her fiction transcends gender to focus on the existential loneliness that is at the heart of humanity."

The Japan Times - Kris Kosaka

A story collection from one of Japan's most acclaimed writers. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Tsushima has been honored in her ) native Japan for her fiction. One novel ( Child of Fortune ) has been translated, but this is her first collection of short stories to appear in English. These eight stories all deal with women facing some kind of social problem or predicament or attempting to define their own identity. The situations reflect Japanese social mores, sometimes at odds with ours, but will be meaningful to readers from any culture where women are attaining new freedoms. The translation occasionally vacillates between American and British English, but the overall rendering is smooth and appropriately colloquial. Highly recommended both as literature and as social comment. Donald J. Pearce, Univ. of Minnesota, Duluth, Lib. Reviewers with sound critical judgment 8 and an interest in literary fiction, experimen tal writing, and/or fiction in translation are invited to send two sample reviews to Bar bara Hoffert, The Book Review.

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