Platonic Love

A cat who looks like Orson Welles and turns out to be the grim reaper. A murder in a secret society of chivalric schoolboys. A girl raised among rabbits who slowly transforms into one herself.


First published in Japan in the 1970s, Mieko Kanai's stories unfold according to the exquisite and merciless logic of dreams, teeming with transgressive sexuality, grotesque family ties, endless labyrinths and metafictional puzzles that blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality.


Written with a dazzling mixture of gothic sensuality, surreal comedy and psychological precision, these uncanny fictions move between childhood nightmare and erotic hallucination, dissolving identities and opening ordinary domestic spaces onto worlds governed by mythic and irrational forces.


Finally translated into English by Polly Barton, this collection reveals Kanai as a vital and previously missing figure in modern Japanese literature, bridging the decadent eroticism of Tanizaki and the surrealism of Kobo Abe with the contemporary fiction of Haruki Murakami, Hiroko Oyamada and Sayaka Murata.