Wildcat Dome - by Yuko Tsushima

Book Synopsis

An epic novel of postwar Japan--a powerful reckoning with empire, catastrophe, trauma, and truth-telling--by the author of Territory of Light.

Mitch and Yonko haven't spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo--but ever since the sudden death of Mitch's brother, they've been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster.

Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they've kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it's all around them. Like history, it repeats itself.

Yuko Tsushima's sweeping and consuming novel is a metaphysical saga of postwar Japan. Wildcat Dome is a hugely ambitious exploration of denial, of the ways in which countries and their citizens avoid telling the truth--a tale of guilt, loss, and inevitable reckoning.

About the Author

Yuko Tsushima is considered one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation. Born in Tokyo in 1947, she was the daughter of the novelist Osamu Dazai, who took his own life when she was one year old. She wrote over a dozen novels, including Territory of Light and Woman Running in the Mountains, and won many awards, including the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature (1977), the Kawabata Prize (1983), and the Tanizaki Prize (1998). She died in 2016.

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a literary translator. Born in Tokyo, raised in Texas, she is the co-translator of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Kappa (New Directions, 2023). She lives in New York City.