鍵のない夢を見る（2012）／辻村深月 "Seeing Dreams without a Key" (2012) by Mizuki Tsujimura

Mizuki Tsujimura won the Naoki Prize in 2012 for the short story collection "Seeing Dreams without a Key". It was also made into a TV series in 2013. It consists of five independent stories, each told from the perspective of a female protagonist. The five stories are respectively about burglary, arson, murder and elopement, murder, and kidnap and child negligence. When I read the first two stories, I wasn't quite sure why it won a major literary prize, but by the end I was very convinced. If you read the stories in succession, you will quickly appreciate Tsujimura's narrative magic, how she organically unfolds the stories and smoothly reveals key information. Perhaps the most unique and charming aspect of her writing is that she writes a lot about provincial communities and local people. International readers might not necessarily connect with specific sentiments of Ibaraki or Yamanashi Prefectures, but emotional portrayals of the dreams and challenges of everyday people can surely resonate with anyone and that's the strength of these stories. Your best friend's mother is a serial burglar in the neighbourhood - what's the internal struggle of coming to terms with that? A firefighter deliberately burns down the fire station - does he do it just so he can meet a certain clerk? Troubled relationships, broken dreams, post-natal depression and anxiety - all so ordinary, yet all so emotionally impactful. They probably don't work well in translation, but through these stories I can understand why Tsujimura is so celebrated locally. They are great entry points to her more substantial and developed works.