Układ(a)ne

here has never been such Japanese prose in Tajfuny! The collection of short stories by one of the most avant-garde and admired contemporary female writers in translation for the first time – is a real world premiere.

Corporate ants in a huge office building reveal their greatest secrets; each floor has different heroes, but in many ways similar to their colleagues from the other floors. We look through the windows, we eavesdrop, but the new characters overlap with those already known to us, layering in order to split apart a moment later.

We follow a girl who is getting married soon; but each meeting has a different heroine, different circumstances. Who’s who? What is it really about? We listen to the protesting women in the park, we watch the heroine who bury the next and the next items in the garden to deal with … well, with what?

Aoko Matsuda’s heroes have no names. Everyone can be anyone or completely someone else. It is a labyrinth that resembles successive layers arranged on top of each other, and in them subsequent stories – like Pojemniki from one of the stories.

Układ(a)ne is a bittersweet look at the modern world in which we are all so alike that we are all the same. Matsuda presents the dilemmas of women in contemporary society, the absurdities of corporate life, pressures and obligations; she writes about love and minorities, women and men, but always in an unexpected and humorous way. In her texts, she plays with form and structure: the heroes change shapes and characters, prose turns into drama, and serious topics take on lightness. A literary masterpiece full of verbal games and rhythm, makes the texts drill into us and stay there for a long time.