Musashino and Other Stories

Kunikida Doppo's celebrated prose poem of the Musashino plain, with four stories: Beef and Potatoes, Two Old Men, The First Grandchild and First Love.

In Musashino, woods, fields, streams and the city's edge become a landscape of attentive wandering — the piece that taught modern Japanese readers to see their own countryside. Around a club stove, a debate about beef and potatoes turns into a plea to recover the capacity for wonder. Two old men meet in a park with very different prospects for the years remaining to them; a first grandchild renews a family's life; a boy's quarrel with an old scholar leads to first love.

All five works complete and unabridged, newly translated from Japanese, with endnotes.