The Best Japanese Short Stories
Works by 14 Modern Masters: Kawabata, Akutagawa and More
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.
'Lane Dunlop's translations read elegantly, and his selection of modern Japanese Stories is both fresh and persuasive.' — Donald Keene, Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature
Lane Dunlop (1937/38 - 2013) 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. His translations include Kafu Nagai's During the Rains & Flowers in the Shade: Two Novellas and 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 Koda Aya: A Japanese Literary Daughter and editor, with Dennis Washburn, of Studies in Modern Japanese Literature: Essays and Translations in Honor of Edwin McClellan.
