KYOKO YOSHIDA official web
Kyoko Yoshida was born and raised in Fukuoka, studied in Kyoto and Milwaukee, taught in Yokohama and Tokyo, and now teaches in Kyoto. She writes fiction in English and translates from/into Japanese. Her story collections are Disorientalism (Vagabond Press, 2013) and Spring Sleepers (Strangers Press, 2016). Her stories appear in the inaugural BooksActually’s Gold Standard 2016 (Math Paper Press) and After Coetzee: An Anthology of Animal Fictions (Faunary Press, 2017).
Kyoko Yoshida’s debut collection Disorientalism brings together nineteen short stories that systematically smash the boundaries of the real and its imagining. Told with a deadpan, visceral humour these stories unsettle and surprise, leading the reader into alternate realities at once comic and nightmarishly beautiful and human. This is contemporary surrealism at its best—mischievous, dissonant, dystopic, bewildering. Disorientalism introduces to Japanese and international readers alike a significant new voice in transnational literature.
Cover image: ©Takanori Ishizuka ©Dokuro Kogyo Untitled, 2013, 240 x 280 x 300 cm, urethane, latex, TV monitor and others at Dokuyo Stationery shop, Tokyo. Courtesy of nca | nichido contemporary art
