light bestows sleep: i think those are the words of the german swiss writer robert walser. whereas vast, powerful darkness awakens us. the inviolability of darkness makes us want to enter deep inside it, he said. darkness shakes us, kindles desires we never knew we had. a phantasmagorical tale, masatsugu ono's at the edge of the woods (mori no hazure de) — his third book now available in english — offers the eeriest of milieus. with a vaguely threatening (or merely spooky?) setting, the japan

If you told me in 45 pages it was possible to do what Matsatsugu Ono has achieved here, I’d laugh at your unrealistic optimism. Conjuring a wood that is both magical and sinister, Ono sets the scene of a man and his son living At the Edge of the Wood, the pregnant wife/mother absent as she’s gone to her parents until the birth... treading a fine line between fantasy and an unreliable narrator, you decide which..(view spoiler)[ There’s a trail of breadcrumbs layered into the text and the beautifu...

I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway and am providing an honest review. I want to start by saying this book is not for everyone, but for me it was amazing. This story brought to mind Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story "The Yellow Wallpaper". In the same vein as Perkins Gilman’s commentary on mental illness and women’s rights through the person trapped in the wallpaper, Masatsugu Ono makes the reader question the existence of modern society and its health through the sounds and a...

Masatsugu Ono’s deeply unsettling novel’s narrated by a father who’s apparently adjusting to life in a strange country, alone with his small son while his wife visits their homeland to prepare for the birth of a new child. Father and son are living in an isolated house on the edge of a small, but dense, wood. A sinister place where nothing’s as it might seem. The wood’s alive with disturbing sounds a fitting accompaniment to a series of uncanny events: mysterious creatures emerge from the trees;...

...The terrors in Ono’s world seem unfamiliar and strange. Until they don’t. Like an image that slowly resolves into focus, the occasional appearance of people in unexpected places becomes a full blown refugee crisis like the ones that rock the contemporary world. The narrator is paralyzed by the tide of displaced people, “continuous and thick”, rushing past his remote home. He cannot help them; he cannot even speak to them in a language they can understand.No single disaster drives these refuge...

At the Edge of the Woods by Masatsugu Ono, translated from Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter, is a creepy book that catches you at its edges. In it, a mother has left to prepare to give birth at her parents' house. Father and son stay behind in their house beside the dark, strange woods: a place of imps and strange scattered coughing noises. The father does his best in this unusual place to get by through moments of childhood trauma and heartache, feeling helpless in this new-ish place where

At læse Masatsugo Ono er som at medvirke i et eventyr af brødrene Grimm, hvor man lokkes længere og længere ind i den mørke skov ved at følge brødkrummerne (og ak, vi ved jo godt, at de brødkrummer ikke vil være der, når vi skal finde tilbage). Sært, mærkeligt, foruroligende ... og forunderligt smukt. Læs min anmeldelse på K's bognoter: https://bognoter.dk/2019/07/02/masats...

Unsettling. Beautifully written and translated. Will definitely try to read more by Masatsugu Ono.

Like reading a stress dream

If you are looking for a nice relaxing book, with a plot that develops from a to b and on to a satisfying conclusion then, boy oh boy, this is definitely not the book for you. Masatsugo Ono's wonderfully unsettling and eerie novel, expertly translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, is full of the unexplained - sounds, visions, events - but written in beautifully crafted prose that just gets under your skin.With nods to the horror genre, but with devastating modern commentary on the world's refugee...

Psychological feel, overall a tone of strong anxiety... many of the characters in this have a 'figment of one's mind' bend to them. Seeing a review mention the protagonist being in a foreign country felt like a key to understanding - seems to be about a very isolated man, maybe unsure or worried about having more familial responsibility as his second kid is born? The way the surroundings are described make the father seem deattached from whatever society he's living in.The way his son is portray...

The quiet, disjointed dread in this really reminded me of Maupassant's Le Horla.

If you are looking for an eerie story about a family living next to a creepy woods then this is it. This book is broken up into different sections that focus on a certain theme and time of their life. I felt very disturbed reading this so it definitely did what it set out to do!

Duuuuude this sounds creepy AF in the best way

At the Edge of the Woods manages to be both terrifying and beautiful. The experience of reading this book is so strange, so uncanny valley. Little happens, and what does happen is never entirely clear, and yet I couldn’t put the book down. Ono, through translator Juliet Winters Carpenter, weaves a spell with his exquisite prose and atmospheric descriptions of "the woods," a dark fairytale-like borderland that never forgets.

Stopped reading as soon as the graphic description of a man beating a dog to death happened . No thanks

This book was complicated, shocking, and managed to be thrilling and sentimental at the same time.https://elifthereader.com/books/at-th...

What the hell did I read? Peeing grannies with saggy breasts, imps, mention of obese people and squirrels burrowing in their breasts, and animal abuse. I’m graciously giving this a 2. I keep thinking I’m missing something since it’s translated to English from Japanese. Am I missing something? 😜 Such a bizarre book.

At the Edge of the Woods. The title describes the border where reality and fantasy meet in this short novel. A father and son are living in a home at the edge of a forest where, maybe, all is not as it seems. The mother, who’s pregnant, has gone to her home to avoid possible complications as she had a miscarriage previously. This bare bones summary doesn’t really describe this novel, however. The father may or not be hearing things emanating from the woods. He may or may not be seeing things. It...

"But the things we want we don’t always get. Or perhaps everything, the things I wanted without knowing and the things I consciously fled, were all as chaotic as reality and they all did appear before me, intact, only I was too distracted to notice.""For a void to exist, a place in reality needs to have been occupied. Territory in another’s memory must be secured for your presence to be remembered""He was ready to share. To hold out a hand. Just as all his life he’d held out his small hand in re...