Still Life and Other Stories

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.

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.