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Dragon Palace

Published on September 19, 2023

Spirits, animals, and people cohabit the universe of these eight stories, which capture with quirky insight and deadpan humor the strangeness of human relationships.
— The New Yorker

Read “The Kitchen God,” a story from Dragon Palace featured in the New Yorker:

Included in Publisher’s Weekly’s “20 Indie Books to Read This Fall”

Included in the New Yorker's "100 Best Books of 2023"

Featured in NPR's “Books We Love”

From the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo comes this otherworldly collection of eight stories, each a masterpiece of transformation, infused with humor, sex, and the universal search for love and beauty—in a world where the laws of time and space, and even species boundaries, don’t apply. Meet a shape-shifting con man, a goddess who uses sex to control her followers, an elderly man possessed by a fox spirit, a woman who falls in love with her 400-year-old ancestor, a kitchen god with three faces in a weasel-infested apartment block, moles who provide underground sanctuary for humans who have lost the will to live, a man nurtured through life by his seven extraordinary sisters, and a woman who is handed from husband to husband until she is finally able to return to the sea.

HIROMI KAWAKAMI is one of Japan’s most popular novelists. Many of her books have been published in English, including Manazuru, The Nakano Thrift Shop, Parade, Record of a Night Too Brief, Strange Weather in Tokyo (shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2013), and The Ten Loves of Nishino. People from My Neighborhood, translated by Ted Goossen, was published in 2020.

Photo credit: Rinko Kawauchi

TED GOOSSEN is the editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories. He translated Haruki Murakami’s Wind/Pinball and The Strange Library, and co-translated (with Philip Gabriel) Men Without Women and Killing Commendatore. He has published translations of Hiromi Kawakami's work, including People from My Neighborhood.

Photo credit: YCAR

In these stories, troubled lives are forever changed by supernatural forces. One man claims that he was once an octopus; a mole gives dispirited humans safe haven until they can rejoin the real world. Such strange beings either provide guidance to regular people or require assistance themselves . . . Unique and attention-grabbing, Dragon Palace is a collection of open-ended fantasy tales about thwarted love and lost opportunities.

— Foreword Reviews, review by Eileen Gonzalez

Dragon Palace is a juicy and delightfully raunchy read. . . . In Hiromi Kawakami’s world, humans are the odd ones out. . . . Kawakami returns to one of her cherished conceits, a world of fluid transfiguration; people come and go as animals, and vice versa.

— Japan Times, review by Tu-Huong Ha

Kawakami Hiromi’s Dragon Palace is a short story collection tied together by an atmosphere of legends and metamorphosis. . . . Stories inhabited by shape-shifting characters who cross thin boundaries between the worlds of humans, animals, and gods. Its explorations of other forms of existence allow for a fresh perspective on our human concerns. Kawakami has established herself as one of Japan’s most popular contemporary authors around the world, and with the publication of this book, she now has eight available in English translation.

— Nippon.com, review by Richard Medhurst

Prominent Japanese writer Kawakami and lauded Canadian professor-translator Goossen reprise their successful collaboration for People from My Neighborhood (2021) with another addictively strange collection.

—Booklist, review by Terry Hong

Kawakami plays with themes of transformation and identity in unexpected, sometimes humorous ways. Many of her characters struggle to understand themselves, such as the tongue-tied young man whom the former octopus exhorts to find his own path. Characters also deal with the mystifying aspects of love, finding connection in startling places, and wondering where the lines are between love, sex, and intimacy. . . . Ted Goossen’s translation gives Kawakami’s spare prose all its gently eerie glory in this delectable assortment of the odd and the moving.

— Infinite Reads, review by Jaclyn Fulwood

[A] central motif is the way magic may lurk behind the mundane for those who know where to look. Ancestors might have been goddesses. Perhaps all homes have kitchen gods but only some women are willing to admit it. “Each and every home contains at least one member who has something inhuman about them,” one character remarks. . . . Kawakami is a writer of impressive range. Dragon Palace opens up her career for wider appreciation in the English-speaking world.

— Alison Fincher, Asian Review of Books