Dendera

When Kayu Saitoh wakes up, she is in an unfamiliar place. Taken to a snowy mountainside, she was left there by her family and her village according to the tradition of sacrificing the lives of the elderly for the benefit of the young. Kayu was supposed to have passed quickly into the afterlife. Instead, she finds herself in Dendera, a utopian community built over decades by old women who, like her, were abandoned. Together, they must now face a new threat: a hungry mother bear.

When Kayu Saitoh wakes up, she is in an unfamiliar place. Taken to a snowy mountainside, she was left there by her family and her village according to the tradition of sacrificing the lives of the elderly for the benefit of the young. Kayu was supposed to have passed quickly into the afterlife. Instead, she finds herself in Dendera, a utopian community built over decades by old women who, like her, were abandoned. Together, they must now face a new threat: a hungry mother bear.

“Dendera is riveting, hilarious, dark, gory, and absolutely brilliant...it’s as if Elena Ferrante and Stephen King collided on a Japanese mountaintop.”

—Jami Attenberg, New York Times best-selling author of The Middlesteins

Yuya Sato, born 1980, is a writer of “strange fiction,” which features fantastic or horrific concepts treated in a refined literary style. Some of his short work has appeared in English in the mixed manga/prose anthology series Faust.  His novel 1000 Novels and Backbeard won the Yukio Mishima Prize. 

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