The Sisters and Other Stories

On the last night before she must be handed over to an old creditor, a mountain girl who dreams of Tokyo drinks sake with her cousin home from the capital, and waits for the moon of the seventeenth night. Her silent elder sister watches her. By dawn one of the two is gone.

In a cheap Tokyo lodging two young men study the wife downstairs, who meets debt collectors, blows and the news of her own father's death with the same unbroken calm. And in a remote village of Hyūga, a schoolboy rivalry between the son of an old house and a gambler's gifted son runs on into consumption, prison and the selling of ancestral forests.

Written before Bokusui became famous as a poet, these stories already show the lyric eye and plain, unsentimental pity of his later prose. Each is translated complete and unabridged directly from the Japanese, with endnotes and source information.