Asa tries to give her classmate a biscuit. Nami evades her classmates' playground game of acorn-throwing. Happy decides she's not interested in doing anything other than lying down on her sofa. Each of these three stories begins in a reasonable place-but by the end you'll find yourself in another world altogether.

Natsuko Imamura was born in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1980. Her fiction has won various prestigious Japanese literary prizes, including the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Mishima Yukio Prize, and the Akutagawa Prize. She lives in Osaka with her husband and daughter. Lucy North is a British translator of Japanese fiction and non-fiction. Her translations include Toddler Hunting and Other Stories, as yet the sole book of fiction in English by Taeko Kono, and Record of a Night Too Brief, a collection of stories by Hiromi Kawakami. Her fiction translations have appeared in Granta, Words Without Borders, and The Southern Review and in several anthologies, including The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature. She lives in Hastings, East Sussex.