So We Look to the Sky

This shocking, boisterous novel was a runaway bestseller and award winner in the Japan: "Pressingly real . . . In these pages, you will find the lives of all of us" (Japan Times). Sexually explicit and searingly honest, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begins with an affair between a student and a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex at a comics convention. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman's husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages and hardships ordinary people face. A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high-school girl, spurned by the student, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; the student's best...