Shade and Sunshine and Other Writings

A Sunday morning begins with excuses, ribbons and a mother’s sewing. A toothache sends the same girl into dreams of Joan of Arc before a tiny extracted tooth leaves her strangely sad. In the mountains, a reluctant performer and an American girl draw closer while a festival’s bonfire burns across the river.

These seven complete works move from domestic comedy to a dance-school visit, literary praise and a young writer’s uneasy thoughts about work and love. The long concluding story, Shade and Sunshine, opens with a sleepless friend’s disappearance, then unfolds manuscript fragments about an overseas journey, divided family loyalties, a phonograph sent by an absent father, and a child’s disastrous test of his grandmother’s beliefs.

Makino Shin’ichi (1896–1936) makes comedy and painful memory coexist without easy resolutions. This new English collection preserves the supplied order, embedded narratives, shifts of voice, verse and source peculiarities, with concise explanatory notes. AI-assisted translation.