Night Train to the Stars
  • Published: 18 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784878337
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $26.00

Night Train to the Stars

beloved, enigmatic Japanese folk tales

  • Kenji Miyazawa
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Dark and whimsical tales from one of Japan's most beloved early twentieth-century writers

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
  • Published: 18 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784878337
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $26.00
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Praise for Night Train to the Stars

For readers who relish the disturbing material of fairy tale...Kenji Miyazawa's odd, masterly stories will be a delight

New York Times

Kenji Miyazawa fables are international-class

David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

Miyazawa moves you to sorrow, to laugh, chuckle, marvel - he makes you live

Hiroaki Sato

A marvelous writer who deserves to be much better known in English

Kirkus

Miyazawa seems to have been something of a genius

Observer

A humble and gifted writer

Time

[Miyazawa] had stories for many of our basic human vices, and for our basic forms of goodness, too. And this only scratches the surface of his work's appeal... Everything in Miyazawa's work seethes with life. Each leaf, flower, blade of grass, and berry seems to have its own special action.

Paris Review

Superb fables... in the prettiest edition of Miyazawa yet

Times Literary Supplement

Thanks to the blend of pin-sharp, bright-hued backdrops with outlandish happenings and wholesome messages, Ghibli-movie fans should feel at home

Spectator

This Japanese writer found fame for his poetry and short stories only after his death in 1933. At last, this sublime collection introduces English-speaking readers to his curious and whimsical world

Monocle