A Dream of the Panathenaia and Other Stories

A young man leads his horse toward a festival that may exist only in his imagination. A visit to a country brewer becomes an excursion to Pierrefonds. In a crowded study, a would-be scientist dreams of Lagado, where people compress sound and replace conversation with flashes of light—until an invitation to a costume party brings his theories tumbling down.

These eight complete works range from mythical drinking companions and the labor of making bronze sculptures to a writer’s dependence on a carefully tended lamp. The earliest story turns a lamp’s brightness and darkness into the rhythm of a young man’s anxious love, then follows that uncertainty into marriage. Comic self-importance, affection and loneliness repeatedly occupy the same room.

Makino Shin’ichi (1896–1936) blends remembered country life with fanciful classical worlds and merciless jokes at his narrators’ expense. This English collection preserves the supplied order, section headings, quoted verse and unresolved endings, with notes on names, allusions and unusual source wording. AI-assisted translation.