Motoyuki Shibata still clearly remembers his first encounter with literature in English. He was 12 years old and his English textbook included a modified version of Lafcadio Hearn’s short story, “Mujina.” To this day, Shibata remembers the first sentence: “Kinokunizaka was a long slope in Tokyo.”
“Although I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I heard a whole story in that sentence,” says Shibata, 66. “It was completely different from all the other English sentences we had studied before, like ‘This is a pen.’ It was the first time I thought how fun it would be to read fiction in the English language.”
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.