Spring Comes in a Carriage and Other Stories

A village quarrel over a dying beggar, a department store where the boss's son collects the "Eternal Feminine" floor by floor, a mother who sees only a niece's navel: nine early works by Yokomitsu Riichi, the leading voice of the Japanese New Sensation school.

In the title story, written in 1926, a young husband nurses his tubercular wife by the sea. Between quarrels, innards from the poultry shop and psalms read aloud, the two reach a strange and tender calm before a bunch of sweet peas announces spring. In "Napoleon and the Ringworm," the Emperor's secret skin disease drives him to Russia. In "Marx's Judgment," a judge discovers that his suspicion of a railway crossing-keeper comes from his fear of socialism.

The collection also contains "North and South," "The Sorrowful Face," "Dear One," "The Wife," "Sleepless Diary" and "The Seventh-Floor Exercise." Each work is translated complete and unabridged from the Japanese, with a translator's note, brief endnotes and source information.