Lion Cross Point

By the winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's most prestigious literary award

How does a shy, traumatized boy overcome the shame, anger, and sadness that silence him? In Lion Cross Point, celebrated Japanese author Masatsugu Ono turns his gentle pen to the mind of ten-year-old Takeru, who arrives at his family’s home village amid a scorching summer, carrying memories of unspeakable acts against his mother and brother. As Takeru befriends Mitsuko, his new caretaker, and Saki, his spunky neighbor, he meets more of his mother’s old friends, discovering her history and inching toward a new idea of family and home. All the while he begins to see a strange figure called Bunji—the same name as a delicate young boy who mysteriously vanished long ago on the village’s breathtaking coastline at Lion Cross Point. At once a subtle portrayal of a child’s sense of memory and community, an empowering exploration of how we find the words to encompass our trauma, and a spooky Japanese ghost story, Lion Cross Point is gripping and poignant, reminiscent of Kenzaburo Oe’s best work. Acts of heartless brutality mix with surprising moments of pure kindness, creating this utterly truthful, cathartic tale of an unforgettable young boy.

Masatsugu Ono is one of Japan’s most lauded contemporary authors. His novel Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave) won the Asahi Award for New Writers, and Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune (Boat on a Choppy Bay) won the Mishima Prize. He also received the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary honor, in 2015. He lives in Tokyo.

Angus Turvill's translations include Tales from a Mountain Cave, by the great humorist and anti-militarist Hisashi Inoue, Heaven’s Wind, a bilingual collection of stories by some of Japan’s finest contemporary women writers, and The Art of Discarding by Japan’s original decluttering guru Nagisa Tatsumi. He has won the Grand Prize in the Shizuoka International Translation Competition, and has received John Dryden and Kurodahan translation awards. An instructor of Japanese translation, he lives in Norfolk, U.K.