The Three Crabs (KANATA 1)

Book 1 of Strangers Press' chapbook series, KANATA.

“The dark waves were eerie, the water as deep and warm as the mouth of some vast leviathan, enveloping them with the warmth of a giant tongue. They were large, tepid waves that sucked them in and choked them. In the pale light of daybreak, they felt as beautiful as mermaids. They were just the right age to be mermaids.”

The Three Crabs is a story of rootlessness and dissolution set in Vietnam-era America centred around a party and crucial 24 hours in the life of a housewife. It focusses on a group of Japanese diaspora friends – their rivalries, their foibles, their infidelities – but its subject overall is America and what it does to people, culture, and senses of belonging.

Sensitively translated, it has subtle shades of Carver after Lish; Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, but a sensibility all its own. If it were a painting, it might be a Hopper; if it were a series, it might be Madmen, but viewed and framed by a Japanese eye.

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KANATA, from かなた, translates as ‘far out’ or ‘beyond’, but also hints at a kind of nebulous liminality; we feel it holds in entertaining constellation something of the concerns of each of the stories selected as well as expressing something compelling about the act of reading and the art of translating literature from other languages and cultures.