After Coming Home and Other Prose

A mother comes home from Paris to the six children she left behind, and finds that they have learned to love someone else. A couple quarrel in a Paris lodging house over a schedule of sailings and a hat they cannot afford. A stranger from the pleasure quarters of Kyushu arrives one evening at a writer's door with a letter that speaks of death.

Yosano Akiko, the great poet of Tangled Hair, was also a sharp and unsentimental writer of prose. This collection gathers eight pieces drawn closely from her own life: a festival day in her childhood home in Sakai, a diary of the weeks before she set out for Europe, the long story of her return, a Paris afternoon, a typhoon on the day the First World War reached the newspapers, a short essay on dreams, and a winter excursion to a small island in Sagami Bay.

Contents: The Sumiyoshi Festival, Six Days (A Diary), After Coming Home, Afternoon, A Woman Came, Typhoon, The Influence of Dreams, A Journey to Hatsushima. Each is translated complete and unabridged directly from the Japanese, with notes and source information.