Strange Tales of the Water Country and Other Writings

A lecturer returns to a lakeside town and hears a familiar voice from a past he would rather forget. A woman invites him across the water, where fish gather around her boat and hospitality turns increasingly strange. Elsewhere, a laborer revisits the villa of the woman he once loved, only to find memory, nightmare, and violence closing around him.

Strange Tales of the Water Country and Records of Strange Things at Sea explore the uncanny through desire, guilt, and disturbed perception. They are accompanied by The Wayside Pavilion, a dramatic preface imagining Pu Liuxian, the writer of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, collecting stories from travelers. His conversation with a skeptical pupil becomes a defense of literature’s mysterious night world.

This complete English translation preserves all three works in their supplied order, including the play’s stage directions and the tales’ unresolved transitions. Concise notes explain historical terms, uncertain names, and inconsistencies in the Japanese text.