Green Grass and Still Life

Two brothers and a girl grow up together until a fall from a fig tree alters their shared world. As childhood gives way to work, marriage, and scientific experiments, affection becomes inseparable from envy. In “Green Grass,” the body can be a source of strength, fascination, injury, or fear.

“Still Life” enters another uneasy triangle. A newly married writer visits a painter and his exuberant model, then returns to a home that feels increasingly confined. A portrait, a locked drawer, and a neglected caged bird carry the tensions he struggles to admit.

Jūichiya Gisaburō brings precise observation and psychological unease to these two early twentieth-century stories. This complete new English translation preserves both works’ numbered sections and offers brief notes on biblical quotations, cultural references, and uncertainties in the supplied Japanese texts. For readers of Japanese fiction about desire, domestic estrangement, and the troubling distance between thought and feeling. AI-assisted translation, prepared and edited by Valentin Sarić.