WE, THE CHILDREN OF CATS, by Tomoyuki Hoshino, edited and translated by Brian Bergstrom with an additional translation by Lucy Fraser. PM Press, 2012, 266 pages, $20 (paperback)
In a moving preface to the English translation, author Tomoyuki Hoshino speaks of his love for the stories (five in all) and novellas (three) included in this volume.
He gives the reader a valuable clue to understanding his fictional world by declaring that they are about characters who are marginal ("share a certain measure of minority"). They may not be obviously in the minority, but they see things in a different manner from the approved, "normal," common-sensical way; and their principal weapon against a world that has excluded them is imagination, through which they create spaces for themselves.