INDIAN SUMMER, by Mieko Kanai, translated by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley. Cornell East Asia Series, 2012, 149 pp., $24 (paperback)
Mieko Kanai is a prolific and provocative contemporary author whose poetry and short stories have been appearing in English since the 1970s and ¡®80s, but whose longer works are only now being translated. Her range is very broad, from the shocking, in-your-face short story ¡°Rabbits¡± (translated by Phyllis Birnbaum, 1982) to the avant-garde collection of interrelated chapters that make up ¡°Word Book¡± (which I translated, 2009).
Now we have something completely different: what was the third in an ongoing series of novels set in Mejiro, a middle- to upper-middle class enclave where Gakushuin (the former Peers School) is located, and which has been Kanai¡¯s home for decades. ¡°Indian Summer¡± has now been deftly translated into natural and amusing English by two Australian scholars.
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