story: “An Exotic Marriage”
author: Yukiko Motoya
year: 2018 (English translation)
where: Train in Japan, Kyoto to Hiroshima
note: This story was actually a novella, not much shorter than The Great Gatsby
a line: “The wife explained that it had all started with the stones in the flower dish she’d put by their bedside. ‘They’d get to look so much like him, and I had to keep swapping them out.’”
theme(s): transformations, marriage, partner knowledge
samantha Neugebauer 