The Bear and the Paving Stone by Toshiyuki Horie

Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, three dream-like tales of memory and war: part of our Japanese novella series, showcasing the best contemporary Japanese writing

A Japanese man, far from home, travels the countryside of Normandy with a friend - talking about war, literature, and everything in between. As his ideas of his life become more entangled with his personal writing, the pangs of his past and his half-forgotten memories overlap and threaten his peace.

Owing a debt to French writers from La Fontaine to Proust, the three fable-like tales in The Bear and the Paving Stone are stories of loss, memory and a longing to belong.

Toshiyuki Horie (born 1964) is a scholar of French literature and a professor at Waseda University. He has won many literary prizes, including the Mishima Yukio Prize, Akutagawa Prize (for The Bear and the Paving Stone), the Kawabata Yasunari Prize, the Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Prize and the Yomiuri Prize for Literature (twice).

9781782274377
Paperback , Trade
English, Translated from: Japanese
General Trade
Jul 03, 2018