Daydream and Other Stories

A man begins to wonder whether his family’s life could be exchanged with the life next door. A family’s uncanny closet attracts a detective, whose explanation may be more frightening than any ghost. A young man carries an intimate encounter back into the ordinary world of parents, meals, money, and streets. On a tense night in Tokyo, an observer moves among silent crowds and armed patrols.

In these four complete stories, Toyoshima Yoshio follows the uneasy movements of thought with a closely attentive eye. Humor gives way to apprehension, imagined scenes become vivid, and everyday objects acquire unfamiliar meanings. Neither private confusion nor public disturbance offers an easy release.

First published between 1919 and 1925, “Daydream,” “White Blood Cells,” “Virginity,” and “The Crowd” show the range of a Japanese novelist and translator whose fiction makes ordinary life quietly troubling. The final story is set amid Tokyo’s rice unrest in August 1918.