The City’s Ghostly Vapor and Other Stories

A sleepless passenger notices a bare leg dangling from the berth above him. By morning, the strange limb has acquired an ordinary explanation—but the conversation that follows leaves him with a deeper, less easily named unease.

The City’s Ghostly Vapor and Other Stories collects three complete works by Toyoshima Yoshio. In Companions on the Road, an insistent storyteller offers five memories of traveling country roads at night: a white fox, a mother’s secret errand, a wary cart-puller, an unexplained woman, and a figure who seems both familiar and unknowable.

The title story brings the uncanny into urban streets and a boarding-house room. A man disappointed in love begins to feel the accumulated traces of other lives pressing upon his own. Ordinary clocks, windows, and wooden beams become unsettling witnesses to acts he cannot forget.