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The Little House

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The Little House is set in the early years of the Showa era (1926-89), when Japan's situation is becoming increasingly tense but has not yet fully immersed in a wartime footing. On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped roof. There a woman named Taki has worked as a maidservant in the house and lived with its owners, the Hirai family. Now, near the end of her life, Taki is writing down in a notebook her nostalgic memories of the time spent living in the house. Her journal captures the refined middle-class life of the time from her gentle perspective. At the end of the novel, however, a startling final chapter is added. The chapter brings to light, after Taki's death, a fact not described in her notebook. This suddenly transforms the world that had been viewed through the lens of a nostalgic memoir, so that a dramatic, flesh-and-blood story takes shape. Nakajima manages to combine skillful dialogue with a dazzling ending. The result is a polished, masterful work fully deserving of the Naoki Prize.
Kyoko Nakajima was born in Tokyo in 1964. After working at a publishing firm and as a freelance writer, she made her debut as a novelist in 2003 with Futon. In 2010 her novel Chisai ouchi won the Naoki Prize. This was followed by the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature for Tsuma ga shiitake datta koro (When My Wife Was a Shiitake) in 2014 and the Kawai Hayao Story Prize and Historical Fiction Writers Club Award for Katazuno! (One-Horn!) in 2015. Her other works include Ito no koi (Ito's Romance) and Chobo zekka (A Magnificent View).
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