Incidents in the Country

A rice thief who falls asleep beside his loot. A masseur who sets a house on fire and blames the widow. A blind girl who leaps from a cart because she cannot learn a song. A "model soldier" unmasked by the newspapers, a red bird that calls everyone an idiot, and a baby left behind at a bathhouse.

Incidents in the Country gathers twenty short pieces, and a brief closing note, by Yumeno Kyūsaku (1889-1936), the Japanese master of the macabre best known for the cult novel Dogura Magura. Written between 1927 and 1930 for the magazines Tantei Shumi and Ryōki, they are brisk, deadpan sketches of crime, folly, and superstition in the northern Kyushu villages of his youth. Each one is over in a few pages, and each ends on a sting: sometimes a joke, sometimes a chill, often both at once.

Yumeno's narrator reports everything in the same level voice, whether a village is arguing over the word "alibi" or a priest's holy bones turn out to belong to a dog. Beneath the comedy lie hunger, ignorance, sexual and religious hypocrisy, and the cruelty of small communities, all observed with an unsentimental eye.