Kamusari Tales Told at Night

From Shion Miura, award-winning author of The Easy Life in Kamusari, comes a spirit-lifting novel about tradition, first love, and ancient lore in a Japanese mountain village.

It’s been a year since Yuki Hirano left home—or more precisely, was booted from it—to study forestry in the remote mountain village of Kamusari. Being a woodsman is not the future he imagined, but his name means “courage,” and Yuki hopes to live up to it. He’s adapting to his job and learning constantly. In between, he records local legends—tales pulsing with life, passion, and wondrous gods. Kamusari has other charms as well. One of them is Nao.

Yuki’s crush on the only other young single person in the village isn’t a secret. Yet how impressed can she be with someone at least five years younger who makes less money and doesn’t even own a car? More daunting, she’s in love with another man. Finally finding his place among the villagers, a feeling deepened by his crush, Yuki seems headed for a dream life of adventure and camaraderie—and Nao could be the missing piece of that dream.

Shion Miura made her fiction debut in 2000 with Kakuto suru mono ni maru (A Passing Grade for Those Who Fight). In 2006, she won the Naoki Prize for her story collection Mahoro ekimae Tada Benriken (The Handymen in Mahoro Town). Her other novels include Kaze ga tsuyoku fuiteiru (The Wind Blows Hard), Kogure-so monogatari (The Kogure Apartments), and Ano ie ni kurasu yonin no onna (The Four Women Living in That House). Her other works in English, all translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, include The Easy Life in Kamusari (Kamusari naanaa nichijo), volume one in her Forest series, and The Great Passage (Fune o amu), which was made into an award-winning motion picture and received both the Booksellers’ Award in Japan in 2012 and an Earphones Award. Miura has also published more than fifteen collections of essays and is a manga aficionado.

Juliet Winters Carpenter is a professor emerita of Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts. Her first translated novel, Secret Rendezvous by Kobo Abe, received the 1980 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. In 2014, her translation of A True Novel by Minae Mizumura received the same award. Besides Shion Miura’s The Great Passage and two-volume Forest series, Carpenter’s recent translations include Mizumura’s An I-Novel, Keiichiro Hirano’s At the End of the Matinee, and Tōru Haga’s Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603–1853. Her forthcoming translations include Masatsugu Ono’s At the Edge of the Wood and Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure. Carpenter lives on Whidbey Island in Washington State.