The Bear and the Paving Stone

A haunting world of dreams and memories where everyone ends up where they began – whether they want to or not

Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, this collection of 3 tales of memory in wartime France is perfect for fans of Helen Oyeyemi and Banana Yoshimoto

Owing a debt to French writers from La Fontaine to Proust, the 3 fable-like tales in this volume illuminate stories of loss, memory, and a longing to belong.

There was “something about me” which made him talk about things he didn’t need to talk about, made him expose his wounds. That surely made me more dangerous than a stranger who was totally indifferent.

Visiting a friend in the Normandy countryside, a man is drawn into conversations that plunge him into the complexities of historical chance, religious identity, and his own past. Sharing memories and looking at old photographs, the pair circle around the area’s disturbing wartime history.

A work of great depth and atmosphere, “The Bear and the Paving Stone” is here accompanied by 2 equally striking stories in which:

• a walk along the seashore, upon the anniversary of a death, becomes a reverie on building sandcastles;
• and an innocent break-in at the ruins of an archbishop's residence takes a turn towards disaster.

These 3 dream-like stories develop like haunting fables, full of shadows and echoes of French literature, and all revolve around the unavoidable connections of our past. Winner of Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, The Bear and the Paving Stone is a book of intricate, gentle beauty.

Toshiyuki Horie (born 1964) is a scholar of French literature and a professor at Waseda University. He has won many literary prizes, including the Mishima Yukio Prize, Akutagawa Prize (for The Bear and the Paving Stone), the Kawabata Yasunari Prize, the Tanizaki Jun'ichiro Prize and the Yomiuri Prize for Literature (twice).

Geraint Howells is a translator from Japanese into English.