Summer Break

"Summer Break" is a Studio Ghibli style celebration of the magic of the natural world and a quiet meditation on coping with mental illness. In this story, the narrator spends a few weeks working at a pear orchard, where they unwittingly adopt a trio of small tree spirits. One of these creatures is humorously neurotic, and its anxiety for the future resonates with the worries of the narrator, who feels as if the world is slipping away from them.

This chapbook, which was printed in December 2019, contains my unofficial translation of Hiromi Kawakami's "Summer Break" (Natsu yasumi), the second story in the author's prizewinning 1998 collection The God of Bears (Kamisama). This story has not been officially translated, so I created a translation of my own with the hope that Kawakami's short stories are able to find a wider audience.

The cover illustration was created by Koyamori (@maruti_bitamin on Twitter).