JARDÍN

Fifteen stories in which poisonous flowers, unsettling animals, rural rituals, and overgrown gardens fracture everyday life. Hiroko Oyamada, author of *The Hole*, returns with a magnetic, subtle, and disquieting book: an immersion into the strangest, most beautiful, and most ominous side of Japan. A woman returns to her family home only to find herself ensnared in an ancestral ritual; red flowers linked to death invade a garden — and a family lineage; a gecko clinging to a window transforms a pregnancy into an almost hallucinatory experience; a young boy discovers a wild, secret territory within a neighbor’s garden. In *Garden*, Hiroko Oyamada gathers fifteen tales in which insects, plants, dogs, frogs, tadpoles, crabs, and spiders are not mere presences of the natural world, but silent forces that alter perception, erode routine, and open a door to the inexplicable. With precise, oblique, and addictive prose, Oyamada constructs a map of intimate anxieties — motherhood, marriage, childhood, grief, familial pressure, the strangeness of the body — and subjects them to a slow, fantastic contamination. The domestic, the vegetal, and the animal intertwine with a chilling naturalness, creating a unique atmosphere that is at once delicate and menacing. A master of subtle, deeply Japanese suspense, Oyamada transforms each story into a fissure through which the uncanny seeps in.