Best Japanese Short Stories: Works by 14 Modern Masters: Kawabata, Akutagawa and More

By Lane Dunlop and Alan Tansman

An anthology of the greatest stories by modern Japanese masters (including previously overlooked women writers)!

Fourteen distinct voices are assembled in this one-of-a-kind anthology tracing a nation's changing social landscapes. Internationally renowned writers like Yasunari Kawabata, Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Junichi Watanabe are joined by three notable women writers whose works have not yet received sufficient attention--Kanoko Okamoto, Fumiko Hayashi and Yumiko Kurahashi.

Highlights of this anthology include:

• Kafu Nagai's bittersweet portrait of a privileged family's expiring existence in "The Fox"
• Ango Sakaguchi's heartening celebration of postwar chaos in "One Woman and the War"
• Fumiko Hayashi's unabashed exploration of female sexuality in "Borneo Diamond"
• Junichi Watanabe's chilling assessment of alienation and social dislocation in "Invitation to Suicide"
• Gishu Nakayama's look at an out-of-place prostitute recovering at a hot-spring resort in "Autumn Wind"

Through brilliant, highly-praised translations by Lane Dunlop, The Best Japanese Short Stories offers fascinating glimpses of a society embracing change while holding tenaciously onto the past. A new foreword by Alan Tansman provides insightful back stories about the authors and the literary backdrop against which they created these great works of modern world literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781462923977

Book preview

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Lane Dunlop received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award in Literature as well as the Japan-U.S. Friendship Award for Literary Translation for both A Late Chrysanthemum and Twenty-Four Stories from the Japanese. His translations included Kafu Nagai’s During the Rains & Flowers in the Shade: Two Novellas and a co-translation of Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.

Alan Tansman is Agassiz Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, The Writings of Kôda Aya: A Japanese Literary Daughter and editor, with Dennis Washburn, of Studies in Modern Japanese Literature: Essays and Translations in Honor of Edwin McClellan.

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Contents

Foreword by Alan Tansman

Translator’s Preface

The Fox by KAFU NAGAI

Flash Storm by TON SATOMI

The Garden by RYUNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA

Grass by GISABURO JUICHIYA

Mount Hiei by RIICHI YOKOMITSU

Ivy Gates by KANOKO OKAMOTO

Autumn Wind by GISHU NAKAYAMA

The Titmouse by YASUNARI KAWABATA

One Woman and the War by ANGO SAKAGUCHI

Borneo Diamond by FUMIKO HAYASHI

Along the Mountain Ridge by MORIO KITA

Ugly Demons by YUMIKO KURAHASHI

Bamboo Flowers by TSUTOMU MIZUKAMI

Invitation to Suicide by JUN’ICHI WATANABE

Translator’s Notes

Glossary

For Ce Roser

Acknowledgments are due to the editors of the following magazines, in which these stories first appeared in slightly different form: Translation for The Fox, Mount Hiei, Autumn Wind, Bamboo Flowers and Borneo Diamond; The Literary Review for Flash Storm, Along the Mountain Ridge, and Ivy Gates; Prairie Schooner for The Garden, New England Review for One Woman and the War and Grass; Mississippi Review for The Titmouse and Ugly Demons; Michigan Quarterly Review for Invitation to Suicide.

Kitsune © 1909 by Kafu Nagai, 1959 Nagamitsu Nagai; Niwaka are © 1916 by Ton Satomi, 1983 Shizuo Yamauchi; Heizan © 1935 by Riichi Yokomitsu, 1947 Shozo Yokomitsu; Akikaze © 1939 by Gishu Nakayama, 1969 Himeko Nakayama; Higara © 1940 by Yasunari Kawabata, 1972 Hite Kawabata; Senso to hitori no onna © 1946 by Fumiko Hayashi, 1951 Fukue Hayashi; Iwa one nite © 1956 by Morio Kita; Shumatachi © 1965 by Yumiko Kurahashi; Take no hana © 1970 by Tsutomu Mizukami; Jisatsu no susume © 1969 by Jun’ichi Watanabe

Foreword

by Alan Tansman

Each of the stories in this volume leaves the reader astonished—not by descriptions of things that happen in the world, but by intimate and vivid images of the imprint the world makes on the minds and the hearts of people. Each of the stories records through words the workings of the human sensorium delicately attuned to the world.

The Japanese short story writer creates in a global idiom, in the company of the elite craftsmen of the form. Don’t tell me the moon is shining, wrote Anton Chekhov; show me the glint of light on broken glass. But while reading the stories in this volume, the reader might well keep in mind that the Japanese rendition of that idiom allows for a flexibly diffuse quality, a formal openness that allows the meanderings of the writer’s mind to give shape to the movement of the work. The Japanese story displays an impatience with the strictures of form. And so, one story will read like a meditation; another like an essay; yet another like the muted revelation of the flashings of perception. The Japanese short story—and much longer Japanese literary genres as well—in these ways is modernist but also belongs to a tradition that has found beauty and truth through a quality of formlessness in form.

Being short, and not novels, these stories put aside the elaboration of ideas and the detailing of incident. Not that they lack worldly context. They are enveloped in cocoons of beauty formed by their concrete historical moments. The sweep of historical change, war and its aftermath, colonialism, state and domestic violence, poverty, sexual oppression—in short, much of the dark side of the modern world’s twentieth century (as well the eternal ravages of loneliness, jealousy and desire) shape the reality encasing each writer’s vision. Very little happens in these stories, but the things that do happen provide the strings upon which the writer plays the music of mental states and mood.

Kafu Nagai’s delicately haunted rendering of childhood memory, The Fox, which opens this volume, envelops us in a mist of mood:

There was only the lonely sound of the accumulated snow slipping off from the nearby shrubbery. Although the dark sky hung low over the tops of the groves, which were shrouded by a cloudlike mist, in the snow, scattered about or lying piled in silvery, gleaming drifts, the garden was everywhere a shadowy brightness that was more than mere twilight.

In the story there are events: there is a robbery; a family dog disappears; a fox is killed. What we are asked to care about is the memory of fear and dread, offered to the reader through sensual details unclouded by the interpretive, analytical machinations of an adult mind, in concrete, poetic sentences like this one: The Sound of dry Leaves racing through the garden, the sound of wind rattling through the paper doors.

One of Japan’s most storied twentieth-century writers, Kafu Nagai most famously masterfully chronicled the melancholy fragility of urban haunts. The mood of the haunted little landscape behind a childhood home in The Fox reveals a literary quality of simple tactility and sensuality that you will notice throughout this volume: On the stones of the garden, which was just as it had always been, the moss grew deeper and deeper, and the shade of the trees and shrubs grew darker and darker.

For the casting of the mood of desolation into concrete language there is no greater craftsman of the short literary form than Ryunosuke Akutagawa, most famous for the two stories he wrote upon which Akira Kurosawa based his 1951 movie, Rashomon. In this volume, The Garden traces the life and death of a garden and the people who tended it. People and things meet their demise in oblivion, and memory can only feebly contend with its gale force. Akutagawa leaves the reader feeling the touch of the patina of age, and the slight consolation of the beauty to be felt in a shared resignation to our demise.

We witness an even darker vision in Jun’ichi Watanabe’s Invitation to Suicide. There are various ways to kill oneself, but the face of the suicide is most beautiful after death by inhaling gas or by freezing to death in the snow. So begins Watanabe’s meditation—barely scaffolded on the story form—on the beauty that death through suicide casts upon our faces. The narrator’s tone is clinical; we feel no emotion for the dead. When one freezes in snow, the beauty of one’s face is no less than if one had inhaled gas. The image demands that we stoically consider our own finality. Can we do nothing more than make a final aesthetic judgment about our fate? In the suicides by inhaling gas or by freezing to death . . . the face of the dead person was beautiful. But had they, at the moment of death, been thinking of how their face would look afterward? Was their vanity even in death?

That one might find beauty in the face of imminent death feels perverse to those living in times of peace. The narrator of Ango Sakaguchi’s One Woman and the War finds solace in that very dangerous beauty:

The war really was beautiful. It was a beauty you could not anticipate; you could only glimpse it in the midst of your terror. As soon as you were aware of it, it was gone. War was without fakery, without regrets, and it was extravagant.

Sakaguchi reveals the mental state of a human under siege seeking solace in the prospect of destruction. The narrator feels pleasure at the vastness of destruction, and a nostalgia for the timeless intensity and intimate human fellow-feeling produced by the threat of conflagration.

Like Nagai, Akutagawa, and Sakaguchi, the other writers of the stories you will read in this volume ask you to open your own reader’s mind to being shaped by the minds of writers likely more peculiar—more attentive, more delicately attuned, more obsessively focused—in their relationship to the world than your own. They demand that you be open to a reading experience that may disrupt your normal mental habits.

They have worked hard at their art to open up to us other minds and their worlds, to immerse us in the workings of sometimes subtle and sometimes strange sensibilities, distilled into small, and sometimes peculiar things. Gisaburo Juichiya’s Grass, for example, limns the melancholy relationship between two brothers through their shared perceptions of one another in dreams and in observations of the animal world—a dissected frog, a spider. We are asked to concentrate on these small things, to perceptually focus with the brothers, to see through their eyes.

Through a woman’s view of a small bird, Yasunari Kawabata brings to life a mind under siege by its own terrible mental weather of despair, isolation and self-abnegation. He has us observe a spirit wracked by jealousy:

The song of this prized bird, clear and high, continuing so long it was painful, passed purely into Haruko’s heart. Closing her eyes, she gave herself up to it. It was as if something that had passed from the world of the gods into the life of her husband had come echoing to her straight as an arrow. Nodding to herself, Haruko felt the tears rise to her eyes.

In prose that bends reality to the contours of a woman’s desperation and desire, to her dreams and fantasies and sexual longings, Yumiko Kurahashi, in her Ugly Demons, offers us no buffer between the mind of a suffering woman and her readers. In this intensely condensed image, she combines the lure of sensuality with the frightful power of the gaze of the outside world:

That year I spent the summer in a cottage on a headland. The light breezes off the sea were as caressing as a woman’s tongue. The sea and sky were sewn together at the horizon. Aside from that time each morning when, like an eyelid being opened, it was rent apart by and disgorged the great, blood-red eyeball of the sun, that seam was tightly closed.

A staggering sun, an oppressively coruscating eye, a vision of self-disgust:

I was just like a demon shut up in a shell. My ugliness was probably due to my fondness for despair. It goes without saying that this was something born of my hatred for the solid world outside that shell.

In Kurahashi’s writerly hands, and in story after story in this volume, words jolt us out of ourselves and so immerse us into other ways of seeing and feeling that we feel almost queasily close to other human beings. We witness: a woman desperately but stoically living in a colonial backwater; a man and a woman learning from their bodily responses to a raging storm that storms of erotic desire also rage within them; a consciousness suffocated on a climb into the mountains leading to an experience of gaping emptiness; a woman’s sad fate observed by a man recovering from a nervous breakdown; a woman crushed by her husband’s infidelity; an adult’s failure to reconstruct and imagine the circumstances of the loss of his parents and the muted sadness that permeates his spirit.

These stories offer portals into the consciousness of people delicately attuned to—and often battered by—their environments, both real and imagined. Through subtle observations of the minds of others caught in the mesh of perception and being they leave us astonished at the inner lives of our fellow suffering human beings, and at the creative capacity to find words for those lives.

Read the stories in this volume less for the unfolding of incident than for the rich rendering of mental and emotional states, and you will enter the shade and the moss of the Japanese literary imagination given artistic form by some of the most refined practitioners of the craft of the short story. That craft requires a surgical excision of excessive words allowing for a meticulous distillation of perceptions and feelings into precise words and lean form.

Translator’s Preface

These stories span sixty years of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Between the bittersweet, nostalgic evocation of childhood in Kafu Nagai’s The Fox, set against a background of a still largely traditional Japan, and the alienated, thoroughly modern world of Jun’ichi Watanabe’s Invitation to Suicide is a development comparable in range and scope to that of any world-class literature. During these years Japan, after centuries of seclusion, adjusted to its full-scale entry into the world, to the successive traumatic shocks of the Great Earthquake of 1923 and the catastrophic defeat of World War II, and to the phoenix-like revival of its economy.

Most of the writers represented in this selection are what might be called standard authors. Their work, all or some of it, continues to be in print decade after decade. Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s only Nobel Prize winner for literature, needs almost no introduction to Western readers; on the other hand, Gisaburo Juichiya, who is perhaps remembered for the one story included in this selection, must be all but unknown even to Japanese. The anthology includes the famous and the unfamiliar, writers known to English readers and others whose work has not been translated previously. Most of the stories themselves are new to English. Those that are not, exist only in translations that have been out of print for so long as to be well nigh inaccessible to all but the most devoted student.

It may be said that the dominant tone of Japanese writing is one of characteristically understated sobriety. Whether this is due to the nature of the language, the Japanese temperament, or the realistic mode that has prevailed in the literature is beyond the ambition of this preface. But having once noted it, one must also note the variety of modulations this voice is capable of. In this selection alone are the poignant yearning for the past of Gishu Nakayama’s Autumn Wind, the buoyant cynicism of Ango Sakaguchi’s One Woman and the War, the sexual knowledgeability of Yumiko Kurahashi’s Ugly Demons—perhaps as many variations as there are writers. It is the translator’s sincere hope that some of the pleasure afforded him by the perusal and translation of these stories will be conveyed to, and shared with, the reader.

The Best Japanese

Short Stories

The Fox

永井荷風

KAFU NAGAI

The sound of dry leaves racing through the garden, the sound of wind rattling the paper doors.

One afternoon in my winter study, by a dim little window, as if in memory of the autumn-evening field where I’d parted from my lover some years ago, I was leaning lonelily against a brazier and reading a biography of Turgenev.

One summer evening, when he was still a child without knowledge of things, Turgenev wandered through his father’s garden, densely overgrown with trees and shrubs. By the weedy edge of an old pond, he came upon the miserable sight of a frog and a snake trying to devour each other. In his innocent, childish heart, Turgenev had immediately doubted the goodness of God . . . As I read this passage, for some reason I remembered the frightening old garden of my father’s house in Koishikawa, where I was born. In those days, already more than thirty years ago, the canal of the Suido district flowed through fields of spiderwort like a rural stream.

At that time the vacant residences of vassals and lower-grade retainers of the old shogunate were coming on the market here and there. Buying up a group of them, my father built a spacious new mansion, while leaving the old groves and gardens intact. By the time I was born, the ornamental alcove posts of the new house had already acquired some of the soft luster of the polishing cloth. On the stones of the garden, which was just as it had always been, the moss grew deeper and deeper, and the shade of the trees and shrubs grew darker and darker. Far back, in the darkest part of those groves, there were two old wells, said to be vestiges of the original households. One of them, during a period of five or six years from before my birth, had been gradually filled in by our gardener, Yasukichi, with all the garden trash, such as dead pine needles, broken-off cryptomeria branches, and fallen cherry leaves. One evening at the beginning of winter, when I had just turned four, I watched Yasu at work. Having finished the job of getting the pines, palms, and bananas ready for the frost, he broke down the sides of the well, which were covered all over with mushrooms dried white like mold. This is one of my many frightening memories of the garden. Ants, millipedes, centipedes, galley worms, earthworms, small snakes, grubs, earwigs, and various other insects that had been asleep in their winter home, crawling out from between the rotten boards in great numbers, began to squirm and writhe slipperily in the cold, wintry gale. Many of them, turning up their dingy white undersides, died on the spot. With a helper whom he’d brought along, Yasu gathered the day’s fallen leaves and dead branches together with the chopped-up boards of the well and set it all on fire. Raking in with a bamboo broom the insects and wriggling snakes that had begun to crawl away, he burned them alive. The fire made sharp, crackling noises. There was no flame, only a damp whitish smoke, which as it climbed through the high tops of the old trees, gave off an indescribably bad smell. The wintry wind, howling desolately in those old treetops, seemed to blow down dark night all through the garden. From the direction of the invisible house, the voice of the wet nurse was calling loudly for me. Abruptly bursting into tears, I was led by the hand by Yasu back to the house.

Yasu neatly leveled the ground over the plugged-up old well, but during the spring rains, evening showers, stormy days, and other spells of heavy rain the surface of the ground would subside a foot or two. Afterward the area was roped off and no one allowed to go near it. I remember being told with a special sternness by both my parents to stay away from there. As for the other old well, it indeed is the most terrifying memory I have of that period, which I could not forget even if I tried to. The well seemed to be extraordinarily deep, so that even Yasu did not attempt to fill it up. I don’t know what kind of house now stands on that property, but no doubt the well, with the old tree alongside it, is still there in a corner of the grounds.

All around in back of the well, like the precinct of a shrine that’s said to be haunted, a grove of cedars stood in dense, dark quietude both summer and winter. It made that part of the garden all the more frightening. Behind the grove there was a black wooden fence with sharp-pointed stakes atop it. On the other side there was, on one hand, the unfrequented thoroughfare of Kongo Temple at the top of a slope and, on the other, a shantytown that my father had always disliked, saying, If they would only pull that place down . . .

My father had bought up what originally had been three small estates. It was all our property now, but the old well was on a patch of wasteland at the base of a cliff that,