Alone on a midsummer night, Cat wakes to find a stranger dressed in yellow ‘rat-a-tap, tapping’ his feet. Captivated by the music of Kutze’s steps, Cat resolves to tread wheat like the stranger when he grows up: in the big city where he studies music or, eventually, further afield, across the sea.

Shinji Ishii has written over twenty books spanning both fiction and non-fiction genres. Since publishing his critically acclaimed debut novel ‘Once Upon a Swing’ in 2000, Ishii has been shortlisted for the Mishima Yukio Prize four times and received the Tsubota Joji Literature Award in 2003 for ‘Stepp’n on Wheat’.

David Karashima served as director of the first Tokyo International Literary Festival in 2013, and also promotes Japanese literature in his position as manager of international projects at Read Japan. He has previously published translations from writers including Hitomi Kanehara and Takeshi Kitano.