INDIAN SUMMER, by Mieko Kanai, translated by Tomoko Aoyama and Barbara Hartley. Cornell East Asia Series, 2012, 149 pp., $24 (paperback)
Mieko Kanai is a prolific and provocative contemporary author whose poetry and short stories have been appearing in English since the 1970s and '80s, but whose longer works are only now being translated. Her range is very broad, from the shocking, in-your-face short story "Rabbits" (translated by Phyllis Birnbaum, 1982) to the avant-garde collection of interrelated chapters that make up "Word Book" (which I translated, 2009).
Now we have something completely different: what was the third in an ongoing series of novels set in Mejiro, a middle- to upper-middle class enclave where Gakushuin (the former Peers School) is located, and which has been Kanai's home for decades. "Indian Summer" has now been deftly translated into natural and amusing English by two Australian scholars.