ab Coral

ab Coral is a short story collection by the Japanese writer Natsuko Kuroda, comprising the title novella that won the 148th Akutagawa Prize, along with three other stories: "The Ball," "Mie's Flowers," and "Rainbow." The title piece, ab Coral, unfolds through fragments of a child's memory: an only daughter born into an intellectual family in the Showa era, who once lived with her father in a three-story house but moved to cramped quarters because of the war. The family employs a housekeeper, whose relationship with the father grows increasingly intimate, and the home gradually takes on the shape the housekeeper desires—shattering the once-close bond between father and daughter, until the child finally decides to leave a home that is no longer hers. The story revisits the events of her sixth year from two vantage points, ten years later and forty years later, as the fork in the road—"School A or School B"—returns again and again in dreams half a century on, producing a singular sense of time. "The Ball," "Mie's Flowers," and "Rainbow" all feature the same little girl, Mie, and carry a half-fantastical quality, exploring childhood loneliness, longing, and the rewriting of memory. Natsuko Kuroda was born in Tokyo in 1937 and graduated in 1959 from Waseda University's School of Education, where she studied Japanese language and literature. She wrote for decades in literary coterie magazines, and in 1963 "The Ball" was selected for the 63rd Yomiuri Short Story Award. In 2012 ab Coral won the 24th Waseda Literature Newcomer Award, and at seventy-five she made her official debut, winning the Akutagawa Prize the following year as the oldest recipient in the prize's history. Teru Miyamoto, Nobuko Takagi, and Toshiyuki Horie all contributed endorsements for this book, praising its crystalline, profound style and its dense yet restrained long sentences.