Love in the Greenhouse and Other Stories

A young painter finds love among the flowers of a mountain greenhouse. Beneath their sweetness, an unexplained sound suggests that something is being hidden. Elsewhere, an explorer hears a dead girl’s music in the desert, and a scientific investigator confronts flowers with an appetite for human beings.

Kunieda Shirō’s six stories move between romance, the uncanny, comedy, and detection. A modern Japanese writer accompanies Wang Zhaojun into the ancient Xiongnu world and challenges the poets who have made her a tragic figure. A detective searches a brightly colored town whose proportions refuse to make sense. At the linked bridges of Yatsuhashi, an old physiognomist tries to turn a young woman away from imitating a beautiful legend.

First published between 1921 and 1929, these complete translations preserve the stories’ changing voices, quoted verse, startling revelations, and full endings. Kunieda Shirō (1887–1943) wrote popular fiction and historical adventures rich in invention. Concise notes explain names, period terms, source variations, and the extravagant claims of his imagined worlds.