A Strange Reunion

Tokyo, 1895. Installed in a cramped riverside house as the mistress of an army officer, O-Ren spends long nights listening to the wind and remembering a man who has vanished from her life. A fortune-teller offers a disturbing condition for their reunion: perhaps she will see him again when Tokyo has turned into a forest.

Then a small white dog enters the house. Its presence brings comfort, hostility, and increasingly uncanny echoes of O-Ren’s former life. Dreams, glimpses in a mirror, and voices in the darkness begin to mingle with the explanations offered by her patron, an old servant, and a doctor.

First published in 1921, “A Strange Reunion” draws longing, jealousy, the aftermath of war, and the unequal power of intimate relationships into a haunting narrative whose perspectives never quite settle. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), one of modern Japan’s most influential writers, gives this uneasy story both precise physical detail and an atmosphere of gathering uncertainty.