This is the first, and already quite possibly the best, collection of short stories I’ve read this year. Miyazawa’s writings here would comfortably place him with the greats of not only 20th century Japanese literature, but of any writer of short stories, and yet I’ve never seen his name come up before or any single thing of his discussed. This is beyond criminal.
This is a book of pure poetry. You really wouldn’t think that a collection of what are essentially strange and fantasy-filled Japanese bedtime stories would be able to have such beauty contained within, and yet here it is. A collection of moral fables where beauty is the one everlasting principle, probably closer Keats’ poetry than Aesop.
Everything is anthropomorphic in Miyazawa’s universe, the rat speaks with the rat trap, the hunter with the bears he must kill to sustain himself and his family and a fox teaches astrology to his friend the birch tree. The entirety of creation is connected and One.
Almost all the stories here are permeated with this certain sense of melancholy, I don’t think I have the words to explain it, but I feel it intuitively and innately as something that is also in me, as it is in everyone else. The little sad but forgiving smile of the white elephant in ‘Ozbel and the Elephants’ conveys far more than any outburst of emotion possibly could, the same goes for the dimming and eventual loss of the Fire-Stone in its story. I read a little into the life of Miyazawa after finishing the collection, and its very easy to see that this same feeling is something he perpetually lived with and confronted in order to understand himself and his place in the world.
Would especially recommend this for fans of Japanese literature who want to read something that doesn’t come from the usual places like Tokyo or Kyoto, Miyazawa lived in the far less urbanized and Westernized north of Japan, and in some ways his stories feel like they take more from the Chinese tradition rather than Japanese, the heavy Buddhist influence on Miyazawa and his writings being indicative of this.
One thing I’m curious about is Miyazawa’s specific interest in the stars and their names. He almost never describes the night sky in generic terms, rather he points out and names the constellations. It seems like a strangely specific and scientific use of language in contrast to everything else which is so whimsical and based in fantasy and imagination. Why does Miyazawa choose to do this? It could very well simply have been a particular passion of his which he wanted to share in his writing.
To put it as simply as I can I’d call this a collection of fantastical Japanese fables and folk tales with the aesthetic sensibilities of the great Romantic poets.
Favourite stories were ‘The Eathgod and the Fox’, ‘General Son Ba-yu’, ‘The First Deer Dance’, ‘The Restaurant of Many Orders’, ‘The Police Chief’, ‘The Fire Stone’, ‘The Nighthawk Star’ and maybe my favourite of all ‘Wildcat and the Acorns’.
4.5/5
by marqueemoonchild