Miyazawa is a ferociously beloved author in his native Japan, but he’s never really broken through into the west. To whit: I first discovered him via a super heartbreaking anime adaptation of his novel “Night on the Galactic Railroad” when I was…I dunno…say about 15 years old? It has taken a long, long walk into adulthood to discover a reasonably translated collection of his short fiction. Come ON, Western Civilization.
Anyhoo, how are the short stories? Pretty great, though fiendishly difficult to describe. They exist somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between children’s stories and adult fiction, and are often at their most charming right before they tumble down into shocking, surprisingly raw tragedy.
Pretty much all of his short stories are set in the rural Japan where Miyazawa lived and worked for most of his life. His protagonists are farmers, children, and the many animals that busied themselves in the forests. Mythical beings pop up quite frequently too: the opening story, “The Earthgod and the Fox” details the difficult friendship between a grumpy mountain spirit, a fox with a love of astronomy, and an empathic birch tree. Sound adorable? It sure is, until you get to that ending and oh gaaaAAAWWWDDDD.
Would it help if I said that these stories made me think of the consequences of Aesop and Kafka having a kid, and that kid putting their pen to exquisite prose? Yah, maybe not. There are some stories which are barely more than poetic descriptions of nature (“The Wild Pear” follows exclusively a family of crabs as they attempt to catch a pear that has fallen in their river) while others are vaguely sinister morality fables about the evils of exploitation (“Ozbel and the Elephant” has an important moral: don’t piss off someone with lots of huge, angry friends)…and then there’s “The Restaurant of Many Orders” which somehow manages to be both hilarious and nightmarish without having anything like a moral other than “Don’t go IN there, you IDIOTS.”
So, uh, yeah go read some Kenji Miyazawa. It taught me to never piss off elephants. “You’re welcome” – Kenji Miyazawa.
Me like books.
Me Like Books 