Short stories
Eight Japanese Ladies
Kaheksa jaapanlannat
Arvo Valton · 1968
Synopsis
Nine short stories in which Soviet everyday life tips into the absurd. An official assigned to write a report gets lost in the workings of a bottomless bureaucracy; elsewhere, one spends an hour with a militant atheist, one visits a museum. In the story that gives the book its title, delicate Japanese dancers, visiting, whirl between the mud puddles of a building site where the authorities are keen to show them the conquests of human progress.
Context
The collection appeared in Tallinn in 1968 as the first issue of the year of the series Loomingu Raamatukogu, with illustrations by Edgar Valter, a rare thing in that series. It marks its author's turn towards satirical hyperbole and the grotesque: the reception was enthusiastic, the critics welcomed it, the guardians of ideology condemned it, which only increased its success, and people looked in these pages for the influence of existentialism. The title story and Rohelise seljakotiga mees are Valton's most translated texts.
Who it is for
Eighty pages of short stories in Estonian; two of them exist in French, the title story in English. It should be known that the absurd serves in them to speak, without naming it, of the absurdity of the Soviet system.
Prizes and reception
A collection that holds an innovative place in Estonian literature, and whose title story ranks among the best by its author.