I Guess All We Have Is Freedom: Selected Short Stories

Genpei Akasagawa was already a giant of the Japanese contemporary art world when he began writing these stories, which earned him Japan's two most prestigious book awards. In these ostensibly quiet tales of a single dad in 1970s Tokyo, a doorknob practices radical politics, raw oysters tick like time bombs and gravestones provide a critique of capitalism. After reading this book, you will never be able to look at a sliding door, rubber band or plastic gutter in the same way again.In spite of their suburban settings, the stories here are more radical than the most cosmopolitan contemporary art. Or as the protagonist puts it: 'The whole art thing is a little played out at this point. Nowadays, it's all about buying gutters. Going out to buy a gutter on a sunny day.'Genpei Akasegawa (1937-2014) was a rare phenomenon, an artist who successfully transitioned from the avant-garde to the larger realm of popular culture. Akasegawa emerged on the Japanese art scene around 1960, starting in the radical Anti-Art movement and becoming a member of the seminal artist collectives Neo Dada and Hi Red Center. The epic piece Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident (1963-74), which involved a real-life police investigation and trial, cemented his place as an inspired conceptualist. Hyperart: Thomasson (Kaya Press, 2010), a collection of musings on art that the city itself makes, marks a crucial turning point in his metamorphosis from subculture to pop-culture status. Also an accomplished author writing under the penname Katsuhiko Otsuji, in 1981 he won Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, for his story 'Dad's Gone', translated into English here for the first time in this volume.

Ideal for readers interested in general fiction.