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Still Life and Other Stories
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Winner of the Pen Center West Award, 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. Starred review in Publishers Weekly.
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Paperback, 264 pages
Published
July 1st 1998
by Stone Bridge Press
(first published 1992)
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Introduction & Acknowledgments, by Wayne P. Lammers
Part One: marriage
--A Dance
--Evenings at the Pool
Part Two: family album
--Still Life
--Crabs
--Birds
--Woodshed
--Azure Sky
--Two Men and the Autumn Wind
--The Workshop
--Picture Cards
Part Three: still together
--The Rooster
--The Mouse
--On the Roof
Part One: marriage
--A Dance
--Evenings at the Pool
Part Two: family album
--Still Life
--Crabs
--Birds
--Woodshed
--Azure Sky
--Two Men and the Autumn Wind
--The Workshop
--Picture Cards
Part Three: still together
--The Rooster
--The Mouse
--On the Roof
It took me four months to complete this collection of stories, which contains less than 300 pages. It has nothing to do with the quality of writing -- Shono is a master. It's not tedious or dull or irritating or anything like that. It is, however, deeply depressing, filled with defeat and resentment, but in a quiet Japanese way that seeps into your pores and slowly, yet without a doubt, makes you want to die. Whatever the opposite of 'life-affirming' is, this is it. So of course I loved the enti
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1993 PEN Center USA Award Winner for Translation
Shono Junzo (1921-2009) was born in Osaka and studied English at the Osaka School of Foreign languages and Kyushu University. After the war, while working as a teacher in Osaka, Shono started writing. In his first stories he probed the psychological turmoil of young married couples who are faced with a variety of marital and financial crises. One of these was Akutagawa Prize winning “A Poolside Scene.” Shono now became a full-time writer. Later stories concentrate on the common, everyday happeni
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These stories are a sort of "detail" of a larger painting. The family is more or less the same, and each story details a few moments of their lives. They're largely simple, mundane tales, often pretty cheerful - although the first two, earlier ones are quite bleak. I must say, I enjoyed those ones a bit more. I don't know what that says about me!
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Japanese short stories, most of them about the same family, early 1960s to early 1970s. Quiet stories, domestic slice-of-life, some humor, no high drama. Interesting because most are from the father’s point of view, rare for Japanese fiction. In fact, rare for English language fiction!
Excellent translation, having read the original Japanese as well - very creative in some cases to make it natural without straying from the original language used
Aptly titled Still Life, this collection of short stories is exactly that, "still lifes." They seem to just sit there, but they reflect an inconspicuous but beautiful reality. These are quiet stories of relationships in an ever increasingly more complex time. Shono Junzo's style is reminiscent of the traditional Japanese landscape painters who focused on tranquil simplicity to depict their understanding of the world, and likewise, he too, draws out much more than his writing suggests.
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Junzō Shōno was a Japanese novelist. A native of Osaka, Shōno began writing novels after World War II. He won the Akutagawa Prize in 1955 for his book Purusaido Shokei (Poolside Scene). Shōno's other award winning books include Seibutsu (Still Life), for which he won the Shinchosha literary prize, Yube no Kumo (Evening Clouds), which was awarded the Yomiuri literary prize, and Eawase (Picture Card
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