Like the surfaces of a jagged crystal, each story in the collection shows us an entirely different, distorted facet of a whole. Playing games with the basic units of both life and fiction-the solid certainties of the self, the world around us, and the words we use to describe these things-Mieko Kanai creates a reality where nothing is certain, where a little boy going out to run errands for his mother might find that he's an adult, and his mother long dead, at the end of a single train ride. Using precise language to describe dreamlike plots owing as much to Kafka and Barthelme as to Kenzabur e and the long tradition of the Japanese folktale of the macabre, The Word Book is an unforgettable voyage to absurd, hilarious, and terrifying locales, and is the English-language debut of one of the most original Japanese writers working today.