Of all the major postwar Japanese writers, Tetsuo Miura is the least translated. One or two of his short stories found print in English-language magazines during the 1970s, and my own version of "Shinobugawa" (translated here as "A Portrait of Shino") appeared in 1999, but this is the first book-length presentation of Miura's work in English. It is long overdue.
Miura was born in Aomori in 1931, the youngest of six children, and won his first literary prize while a student at Waseda University. By Japanese standards he is not prolific, and prefers stories and linked novellas to long novels. Miura likes to base his fiction on fact. His early writing, such as the stories collected here, was haunted by a series of family tragedies — two of Miura's brothers vanished, and two of his sisters committed suicide — and his non-autobiographical works are mostly drawn from historical events. The novella "A Diary of Despair (Oro-oro Zoshi)" (1986), probably his masterpiece, is composed in the form of a notebook kept by a young samurai struggling to survive the terrible Tenmei famine of the 1780s.
Now in his mid-70s, Miura is widely acknowledged as Japan's leading short-story writer. He is still writing, and is nearing completion of an ambitious cycle of 100 stories collectively entitled "Mosaic," delicate portraits of the joys and sorrows of everyday life that have won popularity with critics and readers alike.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.