Published in 2019
240 pages
Erika Kobayashi is a novelist and visual artist based in Tokyo. Kobayashi creates works that are inspired by things invisible to the eye: time and history, family and memory, and the traces left in places. She was awarded the 44th Japan Sherlock Holmes Club Encouragement Award in 2022 for her novel His Last Bow (Kodansha,) the 7th Tekken Heterotopia Literary Prize in 2020 for her novel Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (Shūeisha,) and won the the 2022-2023 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prizes (JUSFC) for the English translation of Japanese literature for Trinity, Trinity, Trinity, translated by Brian Bergstrom. Trinity, Trinity, Trinity is her latest novel and her story collection Sunrise: Radiant Stories, is forthcoming from Astra House in 2023.
What is this book about?
Tokyo Ueno Station meets Breasts and Eggs, a literary thriller about the intergenerational effects of radiation on the mind, body, and recorded history of three generations of women in Japan.
Nine years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, Japan is preparing for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. An unnamed narrator wakes up in her grandmother’s body, unable to recall her past. Across the country, the elderly begin to hear voices emanating from black stones which compel them to behave in strange and unpredictable ways. The voices are a symptom of a disease called “trinity”.
As details about the disease come to light, we encounter a thread of linked histories–the discovery of radiation, the race to develop nuclear weapons in the US and Japan, the subsequent birth of nuclear energy, and the disaster in Fukushima. These threads become intertwined in the lead-up to a terrorist attack at the site of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
A speculative novel unpacking the implications of the past and continued effects of radiation, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity follows the lives of three generations of women connected by blood, history, and nuclear power as embodied by the relay torch, a symbol of Prometheus’s fire.