The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories by Kurahashi Yumiko Book

(CW: incest, bestiality, rape, among others)

I encountered this book first in a list of female weird fic writers. She was the only name in the list that I never encountered before, unsurprising as only two of her books seem to be translated, and are impossible to get a hold of. If there is one positive thing I can say about my attempt(s) at reading this book is that it led me to learn about The Internet Archieves online library which has many books I couldn't find. I had to wait a few weeks to get The Woman with The Flying Head and was pretty excited to start. Unfortunately I saw no reason to bother finishing it. I read the first 4 stories. Which are as follows (I returned the book by now so I don't have a reference on hand but the titles should be close enough if not exact):

The Extraterrestrial : The short version is...Two siblings find an alien egg, hatch it, and well....proceed to use the alien that hatched as a sex toy, oh and then they go um..inside the aliens vagina and into space. The alien itself doesn't really seem to have a will of its own, instead it is just acting in the way others want it to. There are incestual undertones right from the stars, and sure enough they don't remain undertones for long. Out of the stories I read this was the one that got closest to being meaningful or thought provoking in any capacity. Peoples mundane reactions to the alien was honestly kind of funny, like the fathers only thought upon being shown the alien is that it should be legally registered, and later on saying that they should focus on other things besides the alien, but they can still keep it "as a hobby". The closer a character is to being an adult the more mundane they seem to find the alien. The themes of identity are hard to miss, the father is a lawyer, and his whole being is defined by it. The sister is about to be a wife and she seems to be alternately fine with it and not. The siblings are limited by their identity as such, despite being in love with eachother. One unsubtle scene has them have a threesome with the alien in between them and not directly touching eachother. Eventually they go inside the alien to space free of the constrains of their identity......

I'm being fair see? It's not like I'm unable to interpret the text just because of the subject matter. I don't think the message was especially interesting or the method particularly clever. I won't comment on the writing because it is a translated work. Overall it just felt like an amateur, banal attempt at the topic. Still somehow, the best story out of the four I read.

The 2nd(We are lovers) and 3rd story(black cat?) are related the eachother and each pretty short. So I'll talk about them together. As you might guess this is were the beastiality cw comes in so I will keep it brief.

A couple, a man and a woman each has a cat. The cats both despise the partner of their respective owner. The narrator is the cat of the man, and she is instantly in love with the male white cat of the woman. Later on she decides that the white cat isn't all that and her owner is better so she uh...they kinda have sex I guess. And then it ends.

The 2nd story has a couple borrow a "homemade porn tape" from a friend thats highly implied to be the owner of the black cat from the previous story. In the tape the black cat at times seems to turn anatomically to a human (well the sex scenes in particular), but other times returns to being a cat and doing cat things. The couple watch it, think its amazing but also seem kind of disturbed by it (narration notes neither wanted to watch it again). A few days later it turns out the friend is missing, they heard that he has a wife and children so they go to check up on them. When they do so it turns out said wife and children are cats, and it's highly implied they ate the friends corpse.

I want to stress my problem isn't simply she wrote something morally wrong (Although in this specific case I can't imagine how you would justify this dreck). If I was squeamish about reading disturbing content I wouldn't be seeking out weirdlit. However if you're going to use these elements in your story there needs to be a reason for them to be here. I don't think either of these stories have anything behind them. I think they're the equivalent of someone yelling "BESTIALITY" in my face and leaving. It's not interesting in any capacity, it just includes these themes for its own sake. It's somewhat concerning on the authors end and mostly boring on mine.

I was going to stop here if only the next story wasn't the Title story The Woman With The Flying Head. If there is anything salvageable about this book it should be evident in the story it was named after, it should be the story that represent the collection to its fullest. Well I don't know if it does that as I stopped right after reading that one, but it sure was the worst of the lot, and considering the previous two stories that seem to boil down to the author battling with her desire to want to write about bestiality porn while still maintaining an air of intellectualism that is saying something.

In short, the fourth story is about a man repeatedly raping his step-daughter while she sleeps, until one day he kills her out of jealousy. Oh and her head flies at nights and re attached in the mornings. Yeah that's a rough summary but it is a. like 10 pages long so it really isn't that much of an oversimplification and b. frankly doesn't deserve any better. I think the previous ones illustrate the problems I had with the book well enough, this was all that again, but worse.


Anyway, for some short weirdfic collections that doesn't stoop to this level

Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2
Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror
The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

All of these have stories that are much more well written and meaningful. And when they get creepy and approach a disturbing subject matter, they do not do it in the spirit of an 13 year old doing their best to cram in as many taboo topics as they can to prove they're mature.