Photo-Illustration: Vulture The half-lives of history are, for Japanese novelist Erika Kobayashi, a kind of fixation. Her first book, Madame Curie to ch?shoku o (Breakfast With Madame Curie), published in 2014, follows a time-traveling cat that draws her powers from radiation — “a sparkling light” that is simultaneously killing her. The cat encounters Marie Curie and Thomas Edison, mapping her own family’s past alongside the double-edged histories of radiation and electricity. Kobayashi told an interviewer that when she was initially researching the book, she found an old notebook of Curie’s in a Tokyo library. She marveled at how, if you...