I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like

Introduction by Quentin S. Crisp.

I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like is a collection of obsessive and yet crystalline stories set in contemporary Japan, written with savvy that is flawlessly streetwise, literary and metaphysically profound all at once.

From the back cover copy: “If a deracinated Oscar Wilde or Villiers de L’isle-Adam were transported from Europe at the end of the nineteenth century to Japan at the beginning of the twenty-first, their aesthetic ecstasies and mystical revelations might involve otherworldly street fashion, animistic consumerism and mantis-like sexual encounters. This is the world of I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like – a landscape of crystalline obsession where beauty and terror collide. In these ten stories, Justin Isis weighs miniaturised epiphanies of artificial paradise against the immense bleakness of the post-Copernican universe.”

Contents:

• I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like
• Nanako
• Manami’s Hair
• The Garden of Sleep
• I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like
• The Quest for Chinese People
• A Design for Life
• I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like Etc.
• The Eye of the Living Is No Warmth
• A Thread from Heaven