Luminous tales from one of modern Japan’s most beloved literary figures: stories of animals, children, trains, forests, spirits, weather, hunger, kindness, and cosmic unease.

Miyazawa’s work has the feel of folk tale passed through a telescope — simple on the surface, but full of metaphysical pressure once you look too long. This Vintage Classics edition, with an introduction by Kaori Nagai and foreword by David Mitchell, is a particularly handsome entry into Miyazawa’s world. The stories move between innocence and terror, Buddhist-inflected compassion and ecological attention, rural life and celestial machinery. For readers of Japanese literature, fables, fairy tales, translated fiction, and fiction that treats animals, stars, and trains as serious philosophical infrastructure.

Vintage Classics / Penguin Random House UK hardback, first edition thus, first printing, 2022. Very good second-hand condition, with light shelfwear to boards and minor rubbing to edges and corners. Binding sound and text clean.