The Clearing Where Bears Come and Other Stories

Nine stories and sketches by Sasaki Toshirō (1900-1933), the farm boy from Miyagi who became the leading writer of Japan's peasant literature, in a new English translation. A land company turns frontier settlers into tenants and the bears into an alibi; a farmer will not leave the field he was born on, even for his son; an old man trades his only camellia for a threshing machine; a village grows rich on a fox god who sells medicine; and a dying grandmother asks for a single orange. Dry, harsh and often darkly funny, these tales of 1926-1930 show rural Japan between the end of the village and the arrival of the machine. The book opens with the author's own short essay on the valley where he grew up.

Includes: By the Arao River; The Clearing Where Bears Come; The Mole; The Camellia; Yams; Mandarin Oranges; Green Buds; The Old Man Born Twice; Five Tales of a Certain Hamlet. With translator's note and endnotes. AI-assisted translation.