My Opening Post for The Japanese Literature Challenge 13- A Short Story by Natsuko Kuroda - Two Anthologies Suggested

Japanese Literature Challenge 13

I first participated in Dolce Bellezza's wonderful Japanese Literature Challenge in July 2009.  I have now joined in eleven times.  Through this event I have learned of many great writers.

The Challenge Home Page has all the information you need and lots of reading suggestions.  Through participation you may  discover others with similar interests.

My purpose today is to let everyone know of a very poignant story by Natsuko Kuroda (translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda) that can be read online.  There are not a lot of Japanese stories in translation online and very few from a writer of Kuroda's stature.

I will also suggest two very worth having anthologies of Japanese short stories at the close of the post.

"Waymarkers" by Natsuko Koroda, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda, from Words Without Borders, November, 2015 

Traditionally three days out of the year the dead return to visit their families.  Waymarkers in the form of hanging lights are set out to guide the way of those returning.  Kurada elegantly describes the lights.  As time passes, the lights begin to fall into disrepair.  Everyone knows eventually there will be no markers to guide those returning.   The close of the story shows the preoccupation with decay, with the markers becoming most valued by insects.


"Those things which seemed always to be recalled in their mid-day paleness, rather than their crucial lighted state, might only have been lit for a short time, as a matter of form, from the inconvenience of them serving in fact as waymarkers for insects, or might have shone but briefly because of the infancy being spent in that house, during which sleep came soon after the late sundowns of the season. They were beacons through those days of summer, neither seen nor swaying, dim and uncertain even in their midst. Summer, which once the summers of excess waymarkers gave way to summers from which waymarkers had vanished ought to have manifested in that absence a more enduring remembrance of the death than in the time shortly after it, blurs and shadows even that itself into the haze of no longer being possible to see and ascertain completely".

From Words Without Borders

Natsuko Kuroda was born in Tokyo in 1937, and graduated from the Japanese department at Waseda University’s School of Education. After working as a teacher, an administrator, and a copy editor, she made her literary debut with a b sango, which won the 2012 new writers’ competition held by Waseda Bungaku, Japan’s oldest literary magazine. Written horizontally across the page, avoiding the use of proper nouns and pronouns, and relying heavily on the hiragana syllabary instead of the more conventional, logographic kanji (Chinese characters), a b sango rejects prevailing conventions of fiction in its attempt to inhabit a new form. The work went on to win the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, awarded to innovative new writing

There are two anthologies of Japanese short stories I think will provide you with a very good start in the field.

The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, 1997

The Penquin Book of Japanese Short Stories, 2018, available as a Kindle.

If pressed, I would say The Penquin CollectIon would be the best start for most.


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