The Melon Field and Other Stories

A moonlit dance draws a young man and woman toward a melon field, where desire, vanity, and fear turn their encounter into a grotesque comedy. Beneath another town, executed bandits keep singing. A friend lends his room to lovers, then tries to purify it; a father anxiously waits for his baby’s first human word.

These six stories expose the unsettling distance between what people claim to believe and how they behave. In “Hitting,” a violent man dresses his selfishness in socialist language. In “Nude Woman,” painters praise their model’s devotion to art while neglecting the poverty that brought her to their studio. Their voices are abrasive, self-justifying, and often darkly comic.

Oguma Hideo’s fiction joins extravagant images to intimate scenes of provincial and domestic life. First published in 1925 and 1927, these works retain their uneasy mixture of fantasy, satire, and cruelty in a complete new English translation. Brief notes explain cultural references, uncertain readings, and difficulties in the Japanese text.