A Cluster of Grapes and Other Stories

A boy at a school in Yokohama wants a classmate’s Western paints so badly that he steals two colors, and learns what forgiveness looks like from a young teacher with a cluster of purple grapes. A child dreams that his precious new cap has run away and turned into a black moon. A man watches a small boy upset a milk cart and walks away when he should have spoken. A father loses his temper with his little son in the middle of a winter night. A fourteen-year-old girl in a poor Sapporo barbershop lives through a season of deaths she believes she has caused.

And at the heart of this new selection are two letters a father wrote in the shadow of his wife’s death: “A Little Shadow,” about a summer night when he left them asleep in the mountains, and “To My Little Ones,” Arishima Takeo’s celebrated farewell to his wife and testament to his children, written to be read when they are grown.

Seven complete works about childhood, fatherhood and grief, translated directly from the Japanese, with a translator’s note, endnotes and source information.