Acorns and Other Essays

A handful of acorns holds the memory of a young wife, and a child’s delight brings that memory suddenly back to life. A gecko beneath a streetlamp gathers the shadows of neighboring lives. A struggling writer buys a painted dish and discovers how desire, beauty, and responsibility can travel together through a winter evening.

In these seven writings, Terada Torahiko turns the apparently small incidents of daily life into searching reflections. His Tokyo is a place of boardinghouses, shop windows, gardens, exhibitions, and fragile domestic happiness. Brief newspaper pieces consider telephone sermons, flight, and other scientific novelties; the longer “Rats and Cats” follows a reluctant household’s transformation as kittens become companions, objects of inquiry, and unmistakable individuals.

Terada was both a physicist and an essayist, and the two habits of mind continually meet here. Curiosity never excludes affection, and amusement can turn without warning toward grief or an ethical question. This new English translation preserves the complete texts, their historical claims, and their varied narrative voices, with concise notes where context is needed.