Impressions of Nagasaki and Other Writings

A teacher’s harshness, a young teacher’s encouragement, an empty room and a child’s endangered flower bed: Miyamoto Yuriko finds emotional depth in the ordinary scenes that remain lodged in memory. These eight complete early writings move between intimate recollection, fiction, literary criticism and travel.

The title essay follows a journey through Kyūshū to Nagasaki, where hotels, temples, churches, street encounters and traces of overseas contact provoke curiosity and argument. Elsewhere, autumn becomes a way of thinking about artistic balance, a letter to Nogami Yaeko examines the life within her fiction, and childhood rain opens a world of fear, imaginative play and quiet absorption.

First published from 1920 to 1927, these works reveal a major Japanese writer’s attention to the texture of everyday life and the difficulty of understanding others. This new English translation includes concise explanatory notes and source information, preserving the tenderness, humor and uncomfortable judgments of the original period.