Still Life and Other Stories - (Rock Spring Collection of Japanese Literature) by Junzo Shono (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the PEN Center USA Award for translation

Award-winning author Junzo Shono weaves a stunning tapestry of everyday life in this collection of short stories.

A young man, having failed his college entrance exams, becomes obsessed with a family card game. A businessman stays overnight at an inn and drinks with the innkeeper. A family parakeet seems to be dead but then climbs back on its perch.

This delicate collection of thirteen linked tales reveals the flow of daily life in the modern Japanese family. Junzo Shono's artful layering of commonplace events, images, and conversations has been compared to haiku poetry crossed with an Ozu film.

Review Quotes

"Shono conveys both intimacy and distance, tranquility and tension, as he explores the shifting relations between husband and wife, father and son, brother and sister."
-Publishers Weekly

"These stories are so artful... they seem like the artless productions of life itself."
--Kenyon College Book Review

"This collection should be sipped and savored like warm sake."

--Small Press

"Junzo Shono describes domestic scenes with airy sophistication and charm. Almost diary-like, his stories flow with "a sweet attractive kind of grace," to borrow Matthew Royden's words. Begin any of his narratives, and you become Junzo Shono, an amused observer of daily occurrences. Wayne Lammers's translations recreate Shono's unique voice with natural precision. Reading Lammers is reading Shono."

--Hiroaki Sato, author of Forty-Seven Samurai: A Tale of Vengeance and Death

About the Author

Junzo Shono was born in 1921 and lived in Kawasaki, Japan. His works have won numerous literary awards, including the Yomiuri Prize for Evening Clouds.

Wayne P. Lammers is a translator of Japanese into English. Lammers grew up in Japan in an American household, using English at home and Japanese everywhere else. After building on this bilingual foundation by specializing in Japanese studies in college and graduate school, he taught Japanese language, literature, and culture at the university level for a number of years.