The Smell of a Corpse and Other Writings

When the earth begins to shake, a writer rushes downstairs to his wife and daughters. In the days that follow, familiar Tokyo streets become fields of ash, refugees crowd surviving gardens, and the smell of the dead follows him home.

This collection presents four complete writings by Tanaka Kōtarō. A Record of Disaster’s Onset and The Smell of a Corpse recount his experience of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. Between them, The Lantern follows students along a dark coastal road toward an encounter with a dead friend, while A Record of Japan’s Heavenly and Earthly Catastrophes surveys earthquakes, fires, tidal waves, and eruptions through legends and historical records.

Together these works reveal a world in which immediate observation, inherited belief, and supernatural uncertainty coexist. The translation preserves the author’s changing voices, difficult eyewitness details, and historical inconsistencies, with concise explanatory notes. It offers an unabridged encounter with disaster writing and the uncanny in early twentieth-century Japan.