Watersong

Clarissa Goenawan

About the Author

Title Page

Prologue

PART I

1 The Ear Prostitute

2 Through the Darkened Glass

3 That Coffee-Scented Summer

4 Onion and Water

5 The Woman Who Fell in Love with a Voice

6 The Polite Giant

7 Yellow Butterflies

8 The Proposition

9 Atonement and Forgiveness

10 One of Those Days

11 The Katsuragi Hotel

PART II

12 Under the Bright Lights

13 Nameless Season

14 Phone Calls

15 The Rolling Acorn

16 She Must Have Been a Cat in Her Previous Life

17 In That Tiny Red Phone Booth

18 It’s Not So Bad to Live in Tokyo

19 There Is No Smoke Without Fire

20 Smoked Beef Brisket

21 Something Like Christmas

22 The Persistent Ones

23 The Cat’s Paradise

24 White Curtains, Tiny Roses

25 Hunting the Giant

26 Mizuki Harada

27 The Water and the Sea

28 Like a Mild Tokyo Earthquake

29 Water Women

30 Welcome to Singapore

31 I Hope You’re Happy

32 An Empty Tin of Mints

PART III

33 Tracing Water

34 What You Didn’t Know

35 Sleeping Lotus

36 Sink or Swim

Epilogue

WATERSONG

Clarissa Goenawan is an Indonesian-born Singaporean writer and translator. Her award-winning short stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Singapore, Australia, Japan, Indonesia, Italy, the UK, and the US. Rainbirds, her debut novel, has been published in eleven different languages. Her second novel, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, came out in 2020. Watersong is her third novel.

Scribe Publications
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Published by Scribe 2022

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

978 1 914484 11 7 (UK edition)
978 1 922585 20 2 (Australian edition)
978 1 950354 97 9 (US edition)
978 1 922586 44 5 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

scribepublications.co.uk
scribepublications.com.au
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PROLOGUE

A long time ago, when he was a kid, he’d dreamed of drowning.

He fought hard, moving his arms and thrashing around as the water pushed him down. Excruciating pain burned in his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. Through the clear water, the sunlight shifted, dancing with the ripples. The surface felt so near, yet unreachable. A woman called his name.

Shoji! Shoji!

He woke up drenched in sweat, gasping for air. The dream was vivid, and it continued night after night. Worried it was a bad omen, his mother took him to a famous fortune-teller.

Watersong

Contents