I started off the new year with two stories (about 70 pages each) by Akira Yoshimura, the author who wowed me with his book, Shipwrecks and these two stories certainly caught my attention.

La jeune fille suppliciee sur une etagere (The young girl martyred on a shelf)

This was the first story in the book about a young girl who has died and whose body has been donated for science. The interesting part is that the story is told via the dead girl's perspective, allowing for a vivid account of the tribulations her body is going through. I was utterly fascinated with this story and thought it was excellent at presenting the stigma of death in Japan and hinting at the responsibilities of parents towards their children and vice versa. It reminded me of the Oscar winning Japanese movie, Departures, about a man taking a job as a mortician's assistant, who has to hide his job from his wife and their neighbors due to the stigma attached to the job. This way of making a social commentary about these Japanese customs while the girl tells you how samples of her skin are being sectioned off, little by little, is masterful. And the ending is quite beautiful.

Le sourire des pierres (The stones smile)

This second story was just as intriguing as the first; it tells of Eichi and Sone, neighbors in their youth who meet again many years later. Sone had moved away without any new word so when Eichi runs into him, he is very curious as to what has happened to Sone throughout the years. What he finds is a fascinating character who earns his living stealing the statues from cemeteries that represent dead children, but he soon starts to fear Sone's magnet towards death when Sone moves in with him and his sister. This was another mesmerizing look into the stigma of death in Japanese culture that really tugged at my heart strings. ( )

L'incipit : a partir du moment où ma respiration s'est arrêtée, j'ai soudain été enveloppée d'air pur, comme si une brume épaisse qui flottait alentour venait se dissiper pour un temps-
l'histoire d'une morte dont on va dépecer le corps jusqu'à un fin tout à fait surprenante...
Étrange et terrifiant ( )