Lemon and Other Stories

A young man weighed down by an "ill-omened lump" on his heart buys a single lemon and leaves it, like a golden bomb, on a pile of art books in a Kyoto bookshop. A consumptive student watches the winter sun leave the house across the hollow and goes looking for a sunset he cannot find. In a mountain inn, the dying winter flies on the ceiling become the measure of a sick man's days. And beneath the cherry trees in full bloom, a voice insists, corpses are buried.

Kajii Motojirō (1901–1932) published a single book in his short life, and is remembered as one of the finest stylists of modern Japanese prose. His stories are brief, intense and almost plotless: studies of light and shadow, sleeplessness and fever, city streets at night, and the strange states in which seeing turns into feeling.

This collection contains Lemon, In a Town with a Castle, Mire, Flowers of the Horse Chestnut, A Certain Landscape of the Heart, Winter Days, Winter Flies, Instrumental Hallucination, Feelings on a Clifftop, Under the Cherry Trees, and Caress, all first published between 1925 and 1930. Each is translated complete and unabridged from the Japanese, with a translator's note, brief endnotes, and source information.