Descendants of the Androgyne and Other Stories

A young soldier lies in a spring meadow and fires one shot into the blue sky. A father shaves off his beard so that his son will not recognize him. A honeymoon ship sails without a rudder, and a lawyer listens to an actor’s confession that turns out to be a trap.

Watanabe On (1902–1930) wrote for the detective and modernist magazines of 1920s Tokyo, above all Shinseinen, and died in an accident at the age of twenty-seven. His tiny, exact stories borrow the props of the fairy tale, the detective story and the silent film, and turn them into comedies of lying, love and cruelty.

This collection gathers twenty-one of his works, first published between 1925 and 1929: stories including “Descendants of the Androgyne,” “Lie,” “The Ivory Tile” and “My Poor Sister,” the film scenario “The Frozen Bride,” and two pieces on the cinema. Each is translated complete and unabridged from the Japanese.