'If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination... Imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes'. So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo's insistently modern culture.The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded żeby an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset żeby cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are - aby fragmented memories of war and occupation, żeby fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, żeby the spirits of their recent past.
