So We Look to the Sky

​Winner of the Shugoro Yamamoto Prize and Book Magazine (Hon no zasshi) Book of the Year

"So We Look to the Sky arrives on American shores this month with a glittering translation from Polly Barton. Building on the wave of such recent hits as Convenience Store Woman and Breasts and Eggs, Misumi Kobo paints a prismatic and unflinching portrait of modern life, grappling with knotty issues of fertility, childbirth, abuse, poverty, and illness with an effervescent touch that never feels forced.”—Chicago Review of Books, “12 Must-Read Books of August”

“Compulsively readable. These characters become as real as one's neighbors, and the issues they contend with are also one's own: gossip, abuse, dementia, childbirth, menopause. . . . And woven through it all, an authorial voice both mind-bending and blindingly bright, producing utterances of self-understanding so clear they shoot right through her narrators with a sense of the almost magical.”—Katherine Forbes Riley, award-winning author of The Bobcat: A Novel

“The intertwining stories in Misumi Kubo's utterly original and enthralling novel take an unflinching look at the messy physicality of human experience. So We Look to the Sky offers a tender, troubling, and ultimately inspiring vision of the ways our lives are connected even as our struggles are our own.”—Jean Hegland, author of Into the Forest and Still Time

“Pressingly real . . . Alive with a sense of understanding of the way things really work out there in the world. One senses a message lurking within these pages that, if Japanese society wants to heal its wounds and head in a less dysfunctional direction, it needs is to reevaluate what life really means through a deeper grasp of sex. . . . In these pages you will find the lives of all of us.”—Japan Times / Shukan Asahi

“A searing and prismatic portrait of the relentless pressures of ordinary life in modern Japan.”—PEN/Heim grant awards committee

“Painting an intricate portrait of women, family, love, and friendship, So We Look to the Sky questions the nature of sexuality and indeed life itself. . . . Anzu’s feelings as she undergoes fertility treatment, depictions of birth spilling over with life force, and the sex scenes are all written with the same passion.”—Niigata Nippō
 
“Addressing matters as diverse as desire, infertility, bullying, reclusion, poverty, dementia care, and infidelity, the plot's twists and turns range widely, to be sure. And yet, despite the surfeit of action, the narrative never feels forced. Rather, there’s a cool assurance to the prose. Instead of journalistic excess, the book relays with great realism the wails, pangs, and sighs of those whom life’s trials and tribulations have left feeling helpless and burdened.”—Fujin Kōron

“There are no easy solutions in these stories, but they nonetheless instill in their reader a belief in the power of life.”—Nihon Keizai Shimbun

"Wonderful . . . Has both the sensuous power and the humor of a dream. . . . . Reminiscent of Han Kang's The Vegetarian."—Naomi Alderman, bestselling author of The Power, on "Mikumari," the short story that became chapter 1 of So We Look to the Sky

“At the heart of this story is a huge affirmation of birth and living. It’s what makes it such a joy to read.”—Author Kiyoshi Shigematsu, member of the jury for the R-18 Prize ("Stories for Women by Women") awarded to "Mikumari"