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"I have lived, always, interested only in myself." So begins the story of Hayao, a twenty-nine-year-old writer whose literary ambitions have curdled into hack work. Fleeing violent tensions at home, he sinks into a sadomasochistic affair with a married woman, haunted by a scene of erotic cruelty he glimpsed one night between another couple. When his former lover Izumi reappears after eight years, memory, fantasy, and present desire begin to blur, and something that only resembles love takes shape between them. Nominated for the Akutagawa Prize and published shortly before the author's early death, this is a delicate, unsettling portrait of a young man's estrangement from himself.

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