The Starvation Storehouse and Other Stories

A street magician meets a mysterious old scholar in Asakusa. A celebrated teahouse beauty is taken into the shogun’s household, while the man she loves wanders Edo’s night streets. Behind the palace walls stands a storehouse with a terrible purpose.

These four stories travel across strikingly different settings. In Shōsetsu’s Last Testament, a doomed conspirator offers an unsettling account of loyalty and betrayal. On the banks of the Don, an escaped university student encounters a crime whose apparent solution will not rest. In Port Said, a destitute sailor dreams of a magnificent ship waiting to make him its captain.

Kunieda Shirō (1887–1943) brings together historical intrigue, detection, and the uncanny. His narrators are by turns sardonic, fervent, and ominous, tracing how devotion and resentment can survive the boundaries imposed on them.