Jardín

A woman returns to her family home and becomes trapped in an ancestral ritual; red flowers linked to death invade a garden and a genealogy; a gecko clinging to a window transforms a pregnancy into an almost hallucinatory experience; a child discovers a wild and secret territory in someone else's garden. In Garden, Hiroko Oyamada collects fifteen stories in which insects, plants, dogs, frogs, tadpoles, crabs, and spiders are not mere presences of the natural world, but silent forces that alter perception, erode routine, and open a door to the inexplicable. With precise, oblique, and addictive prose, Oyamada composes a map of intimate anxieties —motherhood, marriage, childhood, grief, family pressure, the alienation of the body— and subjects them to a slow, fantastical contamination. The domestic, the vegetal, and the animal intertwine with a chilling naturalness, creating a unique, delicate, and menacing atmosphere. Possessing a subtle and deeply Japanese suspense, Oyamada turns each story into a crack through which the unusual seeps in.