That was not ‘magic’.” Her work builds on a Japanese interest in the mid-20th century in books by De Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch So we nod when we read in Conjurer, a gruesome story of sawing a woman in half, that “the audience had simply been shown a horrible spectacle, that was all. A scene that follows, in which Akiko, with lip-smacking relish, imagines a child being beaten so hard that his stomach splits open, is very hard to take.
In the title story, Akiko has an unhealthy interest in “little boys” and hates young girls, and imagines that if she had one of her own “she wouldn’t have been satisfied just being cold and harsh to her daughter: her loathing would have required more extreme measures”.
