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"Taken together, Kuroi’s twelve stories of these four families highlight two main issues of concern not just in Japan but in all industrialized countries—the loss of community and the changing roles of women. . . . Instead of the vaunted Japanese 'group ethic,' Life in the Cul-de-Sac depicts a society of disconnected individuals, of monads cut off from meaningful relationships within their family and with those around them. For most of these characters knowledge of their neighbors comes in whispered speculation and in furtive glimpses through the curtains, while within the home husband and wife, parents and children, talk at cross-purposes. This is a new kind of Japanese 'floating world.'. . ."
FROM THE TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

Awarded the Tanizaki Prize for Literature

Meet the households Kiuchi, Takigawa, Yasunaga, and Oda. . . . In this gently twisted domestic fable, award-winning novelist Senji Kuroi explores modern Japan through the lives of four families who live on a typical street in suburban Tokyo. Beset by visions, uncomfortable marriages, and strange rumblings of the past and future, these “traditional” Japanese families find the world both magical and perplexing. Are things falling apart or coming together? Is any of this real? Originally serialized as twelve interleaved stories, Life in the Cul-de-Sac is an intriguing and entertaining novel from a gifted writer and observer.

SENJI KUROI (b. 1932) has lived almost his entire life in the Tokyo area, mainly along the Chûô Line in the western suburbs depicted in Life in the Cul-de-Sac. He is one of the so-called Introspective Generation of writers in Japan, whose work often depicts the interior lives of ordinary Japanese. Admired for his essays as well as his fiction, Senji Kuroi has won numerous literary awards, including the Tanizaki Prize for Literature in 1984 for Life in the Cul-de-Sac.
PHILIP GABRIEL is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Arizona. His many translations include Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun.