Hometown

Hometown is a short story collection by Japanese author Kanae Minato, released after her novel Confessions. The original Japanese edition, Bōkyō, was published by Bungeishunjū in 2013, and the included story "Sea Stars" won the 65th Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Short Stories. The book is set on a fictional small island called Shiratsuna in the Seto Inland Sea, and collects six independent stories whose characters never overlap, telling of the tangled love, hate, strife, struggle, forgiveness, and longing between people who grew up on the island and their hometown. Among these characters are a bestselling female author who refuses to return home for twenty-five years, branded with the shame of elopement; someone living under the shadow of a grandmother's past suffering; someone bullied because their father is a murderer; and someone isolated by the whole class with no one to confide in. They are either hurt by their hometown or comforted by it, either leave carrying a secret sin or stay out of necessity; and their hometown has made them who they are today. Kanae Minato (born 1973 in Hiroshima Prefecture) uses multiple perspectives and short, stitched-together chapters to capture the gossip in the island's streets and alleys and the undercurrents beneath respectability, often ending each story with an unexpected twist that forces the dilemma of "escape" and "looking back" upon the reader. This simplified Chinese edition is translated by Wang Yunjie, produced by Motie · Wenzhi Books, and runs about 150,000 characters.