SUNRISE and TRINITY, TRINITY, TRINITY BOOK TOUR
October 24 - November 1, 2023
Author Erika Kobayashi and translator Brian Bergstrom across the US
with support from theYanai Initiative and the Japan Foundation
Thanks to Astra House
October 24, 4:00 PM PT
University of Oregon | Eugene, OR
October 26
UC Irvine | Irvine, CA
October 27, 7:00 PM PT
SUNRISE: RADIANT STORIES, A CONVERSATION WITH ERIKA KOBAYASHI,
Translator Brian Bergstrom, and LACMA's Japanese Art Curator Rika Hiro
Japan Foundation Los Angeles
5700 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA
ADMISSION IS FREE, REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED (CLICK HERE)
October 28, 5:00 PM PT
North Figueroa Bookshop
6040 N. Figueroa St.
Highland Park, CA
October 30, 6:30 PM ET
NYU | New York, NY
Non-NYU attendees must RSVP and bring a government-issued ID to show to the security guards.
RSVP Form
(This RSVP closes at 3 PM on October 30th)
November 1, 6:00 PM ET
Bard College | Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
(OBLONG BOOKS)
SUNRISE -Radiant Stories- (English)
Erika Kobayashi
Translated by Brian Bergstrom
Published by Astra House (2023-07-11)
ISBN: 9781662601170
Thanks to Lisette Verhagen (PFD)
A collection of contemplative, lyrical stories examining the visible and invisible consequences of atomic power on Japanese society
Sunrise is a collection of interconnected stories continuing Erika Kobayashi’s examination of the effects of nuclear power on generations of women. Connecting changes to everyday life to the development of the atomic bomb, Sunrise shows us how the discovery of radioactive power has shaped our history and continues to shape our future.
In the opening, eponymous story “Sunrise,” Yoko, born just days after Nagasaki was decimated, mirrors her life to the development of nuclear power in Japan. In “Precious Stones,” four daughters take their elderly mother to the restorative waters of a radium spring, exchanging tales of immortality. In “Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey,” a woman goes into labor during the final days of WWII. And finally, “The Forest of Wild Birds” shows Erika visiting the site of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster, touring grounds that were once covered in green.
Translator Brian Bergstrom returns in this collection, bringing to life Kobayashi’s unsettling, lasting, and striking prose. The stories in Sunrise force a reckoning with the lasting effects of known and unknown histories and asks how much of modern life is influenced by forces outside of our control.
Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (English)
Erika Kobayashi
Translated by Brian Bergstrom
Published by Astra House (2022-06-28)
ISBN: 9781662601156
Thanks to Lisette Verhagen (PFD)
Won the 2022-2023 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prizes (JUSFC) for the Translation of Japanese Literature
"Delicately weaves generations of women to the lasting wounds of nuclear destruction and the hubris of war. A unique and unforgettable novel."
—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Woman of Light
A literary thriller about the effects of nuclear power on the mind, body, and recorded history of three generations of Japanese women.
Nine years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, Japan is preparing for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. An unnamed narrator wakes up in a cold, sterile room, unable to recall her past. Across the country, the elderly begin to hear voices emanating from black stones, compelling them to behave in strange and unpredictable ways. The voices are a symptom of a disease called “Trinity.”
As details about the disease come to light, we encounter a thread of linked histories—Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, the discovery of radiation, the nuclear arms race, the subsequent birth of nuclear energy, and the disaster in Fukushima. The thread linking these events begins to unravel in the lead-up to a terrorist attack at the Japan National Olympic Stadium.
A work of speculative fiction reckoning with the consequences of the past and continued effects of nuclear power, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity follows the lives of three generations of women as they grapple with the legacy of mankind's quest for light and power.
"Erika Kobayashi gathers world-historical, feminist, and ecological yarns to crochet a web of “terrorist” intrigue that tugs the Tokyo Olympics completely off-course. Fast-paced, funny, and thrillingly conceptual, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity is a masterpiece from one of Japan’s most original new voices."
—Margherita Long, author of Care, Kin, Crackup: Fukushima and the Intrusion of Gaia
"Erika Kobayashi forms an intricate lacework of a narrative in Trinity, Trinity, Trinity, unflinchingly revealing patterns and symmetries in the history of nuclear warfare, radioactivity, and the unspoken emotional legacies inherited by generations of mothers and daughters. Possessing its own glowing dream-logic, this novel is dark and radiant all at once."
—Lee Conell, author of The Party Upstairs
"Erika Kobayashi’s compelling new novel explores the nuclear trauma of the 20th and 21st centuries through the code name Trinity: the site of the detonation of the first atomic bomb, an allusion to a poem by John Donne, and the appearance of a strange disease, also called Trinity. Interweaving the lives of three generations of women, Kobayashi effectively combines history, memory, and forgetfulness in a gripping narrative that this reader could not put down. A major contribution to contemporary Japanese fiction by an important new author."
—Janice Carole Brown, author of Tarnished Words: The Poetry of Ōba Minako
"Erika Kobayashi’s brilliant novel Trinity, Trinity, Trinity traces the everyday, yet ghostly, technologies, and the invisible forces, that shape our lives, acts, and epoch. A luminous and penetrating history of our shared present—a history felt on the body, across generations and around the world. Incandescent and indispensable, this is a stunning work by a visionary artist and writer."
—Mark Seltzer, author of The Official World
"Trinity, Trinity, Trinity is a heartfelt and poignant novel about the aftermath of disaster. Erika Kobayashi brilliantly layers memory and oblivion, fear and doubt, destruction and recovery via the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the Fukushima nuclear accident in a story that is hauntingly reminiscent of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Stunning and unforgettable."
—J.M. Lee, author of Broken Summer
“Reading Trinity, Trinity, Trinity by Erika Kobayashi is like entering a universe beating with a deeply intelligent light. Kobayashi delicately weaves generations of women to the lasting wounds of nuclear destruction and the hubris of war. A unique and unforgettable novel.”
—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Woman of Light
"Trinity, Trinity, Trinity encloses the reader in a terrifying world undreamed of by the irrational. Humans reduced to themselves, their solitude and incompleteness, make their way cautiously through a world of ordered disequilibrium. Kobayashi writes with an ironic potency that illuminates the actual at every mysterious point."
—Susanna Moore, author of In the Cut