So We Look to the Sky

This shocking, boisterous novel was a runaway bestseller and award winner in Japan

＂Pressingly real . . . In these pages, you will find the lives of all of us＂--Japan Times

Searingly honest and sexually explicit, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student, Takumi, and a woman ten years his senior. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman’s husband makes public by posting a secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, each exploring different aspects of the passages of life and the hardships ordinary people face.

A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high school girl, spurned by Takumi, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; Takumi’s best friend, who lives in the projects and is left alone to support and care for his voracious, senile grandmother; and Takumi’s mother, a divorced single parent and midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world and must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation and loss, from giving up on his own.

Narrating each story in the distinctive voice of its protagonist, Misumi Kubo weaves themes including sex, love, the female body, gossip, and the bullying that leaves young people feeling burdened and helpless into a profoundly original novel that stays with you for its affirmation of the raw, unstoppable force of life.

Misumi Kubo withdrew from junior college and worked for an advertising company before turning freelance as a writer and editor. She is the author of seven novels. She won the R-18 Literature Prize in 2009 for the short story that became the first chapter of So We Look to the Sky, her debut novel, which won the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize, placed second in the voting for the Japan Booksellers’ Award, and was a runaway bestseller. Her next novel, Stray Whale on a Sunny Day, won the Futaro Yamada Prize. In 2022, she won the Naoki Prize for her short story collection. She lives in Japan.

Polly Barton is a translator of Japanese fiction and nonfiction. She has translated short stories for Words Without Borders, the White Review, and GRANTA. Full-length translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko, Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, and Butter by Asako Yuzuki. She has written two books, Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History. She lives in the UK.