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The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P
Rieko Matsuura
Translated by Michael Emmerich
Hardcover 432 pages
152 x 226mm
ISBN : 978-4-7700-3116-7 / 4-7700-3116-5
Publish : Jun, 2009
Price : $24.95 |
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[ About the Book ]
Kazumi kicked away the kotatsu quilt with her black-socked foot and thrust her leg out in front of me. I need hardly mention that removing other people's socks is not my thing.
"Are you serious?"
"Just take a look, please. Hurry."
Unable to resist her urgency, I grudgingly inserted my two index fingers into the top of her sock and pulled.
I stared, entranced.
THE BIG TOE OF HER RIGHT FOOT WAS A PENIS.
from the Prologue
The acclaimed, best-selling novel, finally available in English!
Every decade or so a novel appears that leaves its mark on an entire generation. For Japan in the 1990s, that novel was Rieko Matsuura's The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P. An astonishing, gripping read, this now legendary book was both a critical success and an instant sensation that flew off the shelves. Selling more than 300,000 copies in hardcover, it rocketed its cult author to stardom almost overnight.
The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P tells the story of Kazumi Mano, a naive twenty-two-year-old who wakes up one afternoon to discover that her big toe has turned into a penis. Her life as an ordinary girl is over, and a rigorous "apprenticeship" has begun. Kazumi flees her homophobic fiance after he tries to castrate her, and hooks up with a blind pianist with whom she falls in love. Together they join a troupe of sexually deformed and emotionally twisted men and women who tour the country performing what amounts to sexual freak shows. In the course of her bizarre journey, Kazumi is forced to reconsider what she had always passively accepted: her body, her sexuality, and her life.
By turns provocative, intelligent, humorous, heart-breaking, and grotesque, The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P is like no other novel you will read. Matsuura is a master of sensual storytelling, and this is her chef d'oeuvre.
Reviews
"With pleasure as her scalpel, Rieko Matsuura opens up a world all her own, that no one else can ever hope to imitate. She has one enduring theme. And that theme is love." - Natsuo Kirino, author of Out
"Matsuura's cult classic is finally available to readers of English, and we've been missing a treasure. This adventure fable explores sex, gender and the erotic with seditious lucidity and a soaring imagination that examines the whole ab-surd concoction from unexpected angles. It is enchanting, hilarious, and genuinely poignant." - Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love
"Matsuura's imagination is limitless." —The World
About the Author
Rieko Matsuura was born in Matsuyama, Japan, in 1958, and graduated from Aoyama Gakuin University with a BA in French literature. She debuted as a writer in 1978, while still in college, with "The Day of the Funeral", a short story that won that year's Bungakukai Prize for New Writers. Since then, she has published six works of fiction and three essay collections - among them Natural Woman (1987), a series of three related novell as exploring lesbian love; The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P (1993), a bestseller that won the Women's Literature Prize, Japan's most prestigious literary award for women writers; and A Dog's Body (2007), about the intimate but nonsexual relationship between a woman with "species identity disorder" who turns into a dog, and her friend-turned-owner.
The Apprenticeship of Big Toe P is Matsuura's first novel to be translated into English.
THE TRANSLATOR
Michael Emmerich has translated eleven books from Japanese by authors including Banana Yoshimoto, Yasunari Kawabata, and Gen'ichiro Takahashi. He teaches Japanese literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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