about this book

For sixty years, Tomoko Yoshida, one of Japan’s most enigmatic avant-garde writers of the twentieth century, has refused translation. Written between 1967 and 1977, Dunderhead is a brutal, lucid triptych exploring poverty, resentment, and the body’s last defences.

A bored grocery store employee drowns a neighbour’s kitten in sewage, nudging a pram downhill until it meets a telephone pole. A man visits his dying enemy, and only friend, in a final attempt at dominance. A poor, shame-ridden woman named “Crab” observes the violence surrounding her home.

Yoshida’s work is rooted in the afterlife and trauma of empire. Her father, a military colonel, led her through six schools across mainland Japan and Manchuria, then to Sakhalin in 1945, where Soviet soldiers took him from their home, and he was never seen again. In the years that followed, while still a teenager, she wrote to Yukio Mishima, asking to stage one of his plays. He agreed, and her career began. Years later, when she received the Akutagawa Prize, Mishima served on the jury. She went on to found the literary magazine Gomu alongside her husband in 1963, and later Baru, a publication she started and edited into her late eighties. She still writes every day.

A cult figure of the highest order, Yoshida is closely read by generations of writers who came after her, including Yoko Ogawa, Hiroko Oyamada, and Hiromi Kawakami. Though her work often describes tragedy, it rarely lingers on it, attending instead to the landscapes that emerge in its wake. Beneath the starkness of her world lies a deep empathy for the “dunderheads” who carry it.

This book was selected by Tique for Objects & Sounds.