Kirjahaku

In these eight immaculately realised strange stories, Quentin S. Crisp delves deep into the decadence of contemporary life. The fresh originality of the tales and their settings: an English country garden in 'Cousin X'; contemporary Japan in 'A Lake': is matched by the elegance of the writing. They are unified, perhaps, by a yearning for the achingly perfect, ecstatic moment. As Mark Samuels points out in his Foreword, Crisp's fiction is '. . . too multi-layered, too individual, to be labelled. One can spot influences here and there, a dash of this and a sprinkling of that, but the end result is much greater than the sum of its parts.'

Aiaigasa--1. (adverb) under one umbrella 2. (noun) a romantically shared umbrella.Here, under one umbrella, shared by author and illustrator, are poems, zuihitsu (essays) and illustrations from a three-week sojourn in Japan in the autumn of 2015.Covering over a dozen locations between Osaka in the south and Naruko in the north, this travelogue now and then crosses the older path of Basho, geographically, and the footsteps of the travellers awaken echoes of the past, both cultural and personal.Far from a guidebook, this is a bewilderment of detours and digressions, a celebration of the intersections of shared experience, and a time-steeped meditation on the meaning of a life's attachment to a place that is not home.