The Holy Family and Other Writings

A death brings a young man and a widow together. In the shadow of the man they both knew, Henri Kōno begins to enter the life of the Saiki household, where sympathy, love, and misunderstanding quietly change their shapes.

The Holy Family is joined here by five other works that reveal Hori Tatsuo’s early range. A mountain village becomes a world of picture-postcard fantasies. A harbor landscape seems aware of the gaze upon it. Children turn an attic into a secret refuge, until one boy’s grief changes the meaning of their games. A policeman finds a notebook whose verses and strange observations escape his understanding.

In Poets Calculate Too, Hori considers literary creation through Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Radiguet, Gide, Joyce, and others, asking how calculation, dreams, and form can produce a work that moves us.