قصة الكتاب :
Shinchōsha (Shinchō Bunko), 2012. 318 pp. ¥520. ISBN 978-4-
10-139141-0.
Kubo Misumi
Born in Tokyo in 1965. After working at an advertising and production
company, became a freelance editor and writer. In 2009, her
short story “Mikumari” won the grand prize in the R-18 Prizes in
Literature by Women for Women. The story was included in the
collection Fugainai boku wa sora o mita, which won the Yamamoto
Shūgorō Prize in 2011 and was made into a film directed by Tanada
Yuki and shown at the Toronto International Film Festival.

This is a collection of five connected stories. Events in the life of a high school
boy whose mother runs a maternity clinic act as an organizing axis, linking the
stories in a loose spiral across gaps of time and space.
The opening story shows the midwife’s son acting the lead in a series of sexual
role-play scenarios scripted by a housewife with a fetish for dressing up as her
favorite anime characters. In the second story, the perspective shifts to an otaku
housewife who was bullied as a schoolgirl and is now visiting a fertility clinic. The
reader gradually comes to realize that this is the same housewife from the first
story. In the stories that follow, we are introduced to the daily lives of the young
man’s girlfriend, a classmate struggling with poverty, and a coworker in the convenience
store where that classmate works part-time who is struggling to come
to terms with some unusual sexual proclivities.
As the same events are shown from the perspectives of different characters,
discrepancies become apparent between the thoughts of the background characters
and the world seen by the protagonist. The clumsy but warm emotions of
characters seen only tangentially gradually overlap and reinforce each other.
The main action involves a leak of personal information over the Internet: a
suitably shady and contemporary series of events. Despite deep emotional scars,
the characters remain passive, almost numb. It is the infectious enthusiasm for life
of the midwife mother and her assistant, Mitchan, that saves the day. (SH)