Night Train to the Stars

Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) was born and raised in Iwate, a rural part of Northern Japan, largely cut off from the modern world. As a boy he was fascinated by glimpses of the modern industrial world - train lines and telegraph poles running into the distance - and he hoarded scientific information. His stories often contain fantastical descriptions of landscape alongside technological details. He was also deeply connected to the folk tales of Japan and interested in both Buddhism and Christianity.

After graduation from agricultural college, he moved to Tokyo to write and work as a proofreader. When his sister became ill, he returned to Iwate to care for her and remained there for the rest of his life. He devoted himself to the education and protection of the local farming community, even eating the same poor diet in solidarity with his neighbours contributing to his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 37. Only two of Miyazawa's works were published during his lifetime. His success and fame as a writer came posthumously but his poetry and stories are popular in Japan to this day.

Japanese fairy tales - enchanting, enigmatic stories of animals, human beings and the great natural world.

Dark and innocent, sublime and whimsical, Miyazawa's stories have the ageless feel of the best fairy tales. There are animal allegories such as 'The Ungrateful Rat' where a rude rodent insults all the objects he meets - until he meets the Rat Trap/ There are morality tales such as 'The Restaurant of Many Orders', where two hunters become the hunted. There are also transcendent stories of childhood and mortality like Miyazawa's best-known 'Night Train to the Stars', where a magical steam train carries children through the night and up to the heavens.

These stories reveal the unique brilliance of one of Japan's most beloved early twentieth-century writers.

WITH A FOREWORD BY DAVID MITCHELL AND AN INTRODUCTION BY KAORI NAGAI

'Kenji Miyazawa fables are international-class' David Mitchell

'For readers who relish the disturbing material of fairy tale, the specificity and surprise of tanka, collisions of the everyday with the supernatural and glimpses of Japan right on the brink of industrialization, Kenji Miyazawa's masterly stories will be a delight' New York Times

'Few works have given me so much pleasure (and hard work) as the tales of Miyazawa Kenji [...] more genuine originality, and a more universal appeal, than almost anything else I have done.' John Bester, translator