Still Life and Other Stories (Rock Spring Collection of Japanese Literature) - Softcover

Shono, Junzo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1880656027 ISBN 13: 9781880656020

Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, 1992

Synopsis

Winner of the PEN Center USA Award for translation

Award-winning author Junzo Shono weaves a stunning tapestry of everyday life in this collection of short stories.

A young man, having failed his college entrance exams, becomes obsessed with a family card game. A businessman stays overnight at an inn and drinks with the innkeeper. A family parakeet seems to be dead but then climbs back on its perch.

This delicate collection of thirteen linked tales reveals the flow of daily life in the modern Japanese family. Junzo Shono's artful layering of commonplace events, images, and conversations has been compared to haiku poetry crossed with an Ozu film.

About this title

About the Author

Junzo Shono was born in 1921 and lived in Kawasaki, Japan. His works have won numerous literary awards, including the Yomiuri Prize for Evening Clouds.

Wayne P. Lammers is a translator of Japanese into English. Lammers grew up in Japan in an American household, using English at home and Japanese everywhere else. After building on this bilingual foundation by specializing in Japanese studies in college and graduate school, he taught Japanese language, literature, and culture at the university level for a number of years.

Reviews

This first translation into English of a penetrating collection of stories by one of Japan's preeminent postwar writers focuses on the small events and revelations of domestic life. In one story, a straying young husband and his unhappy wife attempt to construct their lives around the growing void between them. Another tells of a bureaucrat fired from his job for embezzlement who still leaves the house every day so his children won't know about his predicament. The other 11 pieces form a sort of novella dealing exclusively with the Yomogida family. Shono is particularly adept at capturing close family moments, such as an intense game of cards played every night before a daughter's upcoming wedding--an unconscious effort to stave off the imminent breakup of the family circle. In another moving story Shono describes Mr. Yomogida taking homemade sushi to a widower friend. Shono conveys both intimacy and distance, tranquility and tension, as he explores the shifting relations between husband and wife, father and son, brother and sister. Lammers's excellent translation keeps the dialogue and language deceptively simple yet nuanced and subtle; he makes the family Japanese and universal at the same time.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1880656027
• ISBN 13: 9781880656020
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264