A Single Match

In this collection of hauntingly elliptical short stories, Oji Suzuki explores memory, relationships and loss with a loose narrative style, filling each tale with a sense of unfulfilled longing. He plumbs the dissolute depths of human psychology, literally bathing his characters in expansive shadows that paradoxically reveal as much as they obscure. A young man catches a cold after being soaked in the rain and is tended to by his grandmother. He drifts, dreaming of a train trip with an older brother he doesnÆt have. A travelling salesman comes across a boy lying in the middle of the road and stops to have a cigarette and tell a story that drifts through memories of faces and places, before settling back on the travelling salesman and the boy pretending to not