So We Look to the Sky
A Novel
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So We Look to the Sky
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Narrated by:
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Scott Keiji Takeda
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By:
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Misumi Kubo
About this listen
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.
©2010 Misumi Kubo; English-language translation copyright © 2021 by Polly Barton (P)2025 Skyhorse AudioCritic reviews
“A compelling collection of interconnected short stories that delve into the complexities of human relationships, societal dislocation, and personal struggles within contemporary Japanese society. . . So We Look to the Sky shines brightest in how it weaves these individual stories into a cohesive tapestry that reflects the interconnectedness of human experiences. . . . Kubo Misumi's masterful storytelling, combined with Polly Barton's adept translation, makes this work one of surprising emotional significance, especially considering it makes for very easy reading.”—Alex Russell, The Japan Society
"So We Look to the Sky arrives on American shores this month with a glittering translation from Polly Barton. Building on the wave of such recent hits as Convenience Store Woman and Breasts and Eggs, Misumi Kobo paints a prismatic and unflinching portrait of modern life, grappling with knotty issues of fertility, childbirth, abuse, poverty, and illness with an effervescent touch that never feels forced.”—Chicago Review of Books, “12 Must-Read Books of August”
“Compulsively readable. These characters become as real as one's neighbors, and the issues they contend with are also one's own: gossip, abuse, dementia, childbirth, menopause. . . . And woven through it all, an authorial voice both mind-bending and blindingly bright, producing utterances of self-understanding so clear they shoot right through her narrators with a sense of the almost magical.”—Katherine Forbes Riley, award-winning author of The Bobcat: A Novel