قصة الكتاب :
Shinchōsha, 2009. 169 pp. ¥1,600. ISBN 978-4-10-470902-1
Inaba Mayumi
Born in Aichi Prefecture in 1950. Won the Women’s Literary Prize
for Endoresu warutsu [Endless Waltz] in 1992 and the Hirabayashi
Taiko Award in 1995 for “Koe no shōfu” [The Voice Prostitute].
Her short story “Miru” won the Kawabata Yasunari Prize for Literature
in 2008 and became the title of this collection, for which she
won the Minister of Education’s Art Encouragement Prize in 2010.
Her other works include Watashi ga soko ni kaeru made [Until I Return
There] and Suna no shōzō [Portrait in Sand].

Miru is a collection of four stories, perhaps the most compelling of which are the
title piece, which won the Kawabata Yasunari Prize for Literature in 2008, and its
sequel “Hikari no numa” [Marsh of Lights]. Together, they tell the story of a
single woman in her middle years who builds a house on some hillside property
she has bought by an inlet on the Shima Peninsula. Marked by a precise and
subtle prose style, the stories describe the quiet moments she spends here when
she can steal away from her solitary life in Tokyo, escaping back to nature with
her faithful cat, far from the chaos of the big city. No major events take place, there
are no dramatic twists in the plot, and the world the stories describe could hardly
be more confined. But the supple flow of the protagonist’s thought itself forms a
rich narrative, expressed through the textual presentation of her small, day-to-day
discoveries and observations. The work is marked by the delicate sensibility that
has always been a hallmark of fiction by Japanese women, and stands firmly in the
traditions of the finest short story writing. As she writes in “Miru”: “The things I
grow close to during my time here are barely tangible, almost without form. The
firelight, the water in the marshes, the clay and the fungi, and the murmuring of
the trees’ branches against the walls of the house.” Watching crowds of fireflies as
they rise from the marsh below her house, she is able to muse that, “Although I
will someday die, we will live on.” The collection is studded with similar moments
of revelation and insight. (NM)