"The Water Cats - The Hina Awaken" by Jayne Joso

Author and former Daiwa Foundation grant recipient, Jayne Joso has begun work on a new Japan-inspired work which takes us into the realm of literary fantasy.

Supported by Arts Council England, Joso has spent part of the lockdown engaged in the alternate fictional realm of The Water Cats.

Read an excerpt here:  The Water Cats, PDF file

On 20 October 2016, Jayne Joso gave a talk at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation about the essential elements of the Japanese wood and paper house, and how one of these enigmatic spaces came to settle itself as a character in its own right in her critically acclaimed novel, My Falling Down House. More information here.

On 3 November 2017, Jayne Joso spoke again at the Foundation, focusing  on Japan’s relationship with nature, and how her experiences of living in rural Japan, pressed up hard against the elements, ultimately bled into her own fiction. More information here.

Jayne Joso is author of the acclaimed work, My Falling Down House, and her next work supported by both the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and Arts Council England, Japan Stories, is due to be published in 2021.

Jayne Joso at the Hay Festival in 2019.