The Hanging Basket and the Moonlight

Makino Shin'ichi (1896–1936) wrote fiction out of his own life and paid for it. The Child Who Sold His Father (1924) is the story of a son who puts his father into two short stories, is disowned for it — "when I die, I'll die in a hospital, nursed by strangers" — and sits drinking saké with the old man anyway, one late-spring evening, upstairs at the house of his father's mistress. It is one of the founding texts of the Japanese I-novel: cruel, funny and exact.

The Hanging Basket and the Moonlight (1930) is stranger. A writer who has lost his way between philosophy and art splits himself into three persons — A, B and C — and lets them argue, quote Heraclitus and the Odyssey, and walk out of the house one by one, until he can breathe. Two stories, complete, first English translations, with notes.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

You receive: a 44-page PDF and an EPUB edition.

Digital download only. No physical book is shipped.