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STILL LIFE BY JUNZO SHONO Translated from the Japanese by Wayne P. Lammers ISBN 1-880656-02-7, 264 pp, $16.95 |
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Still Life and Other Stories is one of the books I'm most proud to have published at Stone Bridge Press. The prose is eerily quiet, yet it grips you with its incredible depictions of the details of our lives. If you're looking for a book to settle down with for an evening, to savor, to luxuriate in, this is it. It's been criminally overlooked by most media, and you'll be lucky to find it in the bookstores, but Still Life is a literary treasure, one that deserves your attention. Why publish anything if you can't once in a while publish something this good?-- PETER GOODMAN
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| THE 13 stories in this collection by Japanese writer Junzo Shono are linked by the daily life of a husband and wife and their children. The stories are like the back of a tapestry where threads seem to cross randomly. Births, weddings, school activities, a suicide attempt -- all occur out of view. Readers understand crucial events through ordinary days.
But these quiet tales have a cumulative power. Toys, birds, and playing cards relate to human lives as portents, parallels, parodies. The mother, with her secret sorrows, and the puzzled, bemused father savor reveries and survive unexplained misfortunes. Shono's vivid snapshot technique, the layering of images, events, and conversations, creates an effect Western readers may find more akin to an Ozu film crossed with haiku than to traditional short stories. |
"Shono is one of the leading writers of postwar Japan, a master of simplicity and subtlety. The placid surfaces of his stories conceal a painful uncertainty about contemporary Japanese life. Lammers's sensitive translations convey both the pain and the placidity with moving clarity." Van C. Gessel |
| "These stories are so artful. . . They seem like the artless productions of life itself." Kenyon College Book Review |
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| "Junzo Shono describes domestic scenes with airy sophistication and charm. . . . Begin any of his narratives, and you become Junzo Shono, an amused observer of daily occurrences. Wayne Lammers's translation recreate Shono's unique voice with natural precision. Reading Lammers is reading Shono." Hiroaki Sato |
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| "This collection should be sipped and savored like fine wine." Small Press |
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| "Deceptively simple, yet nuanced and subtle. . . . makes the Japanese family Japanese and universal at the same time." Publishers Weekly (starred review) |
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and Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award |
| "I want to write only what I have experienced myself, and I wish to do this absolutely." -- Junzo Shono, from "Shuttlecock," available only on the Web
Junzo Shono was born in 1921 and lives in Kawasaki, Japan. This is the first collection of his work in English. |
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