Dragon Palace — Hiromi Kawakami

Included in The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023

Stories from a Japanese master of transformative fiction, where reality,
myth, and human foibles meet shifting dimensions of gender, biology,
and destiny.

From the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo comes this otherworldly collection of eight stories, each a masterpiece of transformation, infused with humor, sex, and the universal search for love and beauty -- in a world where the laws of time and space, and even species boundaries, don't apply. Meet a shape-shifting con man, a goddess who uses sex to control her followers, an elderly man possessed by a fox spirit, a woman who falls in love with her 400-year-old ancestor, a kitchen god with three faces in a weasel-infested apartment block, moles who provide underground sanctuary for humans who have lost the will to live, a man nurtured through life by his seven extraordinary sisters, and a woman who is handed from husband to husband until she is finally able to return to the sea.