Record of a Night Too Brief by Hiromi Kawakami and Lucy North

"One morning, a woman treads on a snake. She comes home that evening and realises the snake has moved into her house and is saying she is her mother. So begins the story of a woman trying to live with a snake, with herself, or perhaps with something else all together. This volume includes the three stories Tread on a Snake, Missing, and Record of a Night Too Brief which together won the Akutagawa Prize in 1996. Filled with fantastically multicoloured images and unexplained collapses in time and place, these highly surreal, meticulously worked stories of longing and disappearance, love and loathing are the work of an enormously talented writer at the top of her game." -- Provided by publisher.

I received a galley of this book from NetGalley; that has not influenced my opinions or thoughts about this book.

Record of a Night Too Brief is presented as a volume of three novellas, but it read much more like three lengthier short stories. Kawakami's stories are presented with very little context, bringing together mystical and fantastical elements to normal-seeming situations. There are some passages that are clearly obvious – women struggling to gain power, to possess their own identities, and how women interact with one another – but many of the stories have an absurdist quality that verges on entirely metaphorical.

Unfortunately, these stories were not for me and I had a hard time connecting with the narration or the subject matter. I suspect that these would be interesting to read with some greater context about Japanese culture.