Review: Fire Watch (repost from GoodReads, 2016)

Fire Watch by Connie Willis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This collection contains 12 stories.

The title story, "Fire Watch" is a bittersweet tale set in the same universe as Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, but written earlier. It was published in 1982, and won the 1983 Hugo & Nebula Awards for Best Short Story. The narrator is a time-traveling grad student from a future Oxford University, who is sent to the London Blitz due to a clerical error. (He was supposed to travel with St Paul for his practical exam, but instead ends up assigned to the Fire Watch for St Paul’s Cathedral.) Of course, he is completely unprepared and has no idea what’s going on. The epigraph for this story comes from Sir Walter Raleigh: "History hath triumphed over time, which besides it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over." 5 stars *****
This story is available online here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories...

"Service for the Burial of the Dead" is a ghost story from the perspective of the former girlfriend of a dead man who attends his funeral. She meets him there, apparently still alive.***

"Lost and Found" - The end of the world, and the search for the Holy Grail. Like "Samaritan" below, this is a religious story. I don’t have much to say about this one. **

"All My Darling Daughters" is the most disturbing story in the collection. Set on a boarding school in L5 orbit, it is told by a female narrator who has just been assigned a new roommate. The story revolves around the mystery of her roommate and the strange animals (“tessels”) that the boys are carrying around… this is much nastier than the other stories, but I thought it was powerful. ****

"The Father of the Bride"- Sleeping Beauty’s father reacts to being awoken in the Middle Ages. Short and clever. ***

"A Letter from the Clearys" - This tale of a family in a post-apocalyptic world won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1982. It’s hard to describe this one to someone who hasn’t read it, so I’ll just say that the 14-year old girl is an excellent unreliable narrator. Like "All My Darling Daughters" this is a slowly unfolding horror story, although it’s not quite as dark as that one.***

"And Come from Miles Around" - A family watches a solar eclipse.**

"The Sidon in the Mirror" - A 'Mirror' - a mutant with the uncontrolled ability to become other people - tries to discover who he’s copying, as he can’t tell while he’s doing it. ***

"Daisy, in the Sun" is another apocalyptic story, told in a series of flashbacks. In the introduction to this story, Willis writes, "During the London Blitz, Edward R. Murrow was startled to see a fire engine racing past. It was the middle of the day, the sirens had not gone, and he hadn’t heard any bombers. He could not imagine where a fire engine could be going. It came to him, after much thought, that it was going to an ordinary house fire, and that that seemed somehow impossible, as if all ordinary disasters should be suspended for the duration of this great Disaster that was facing London and commanding everybody’s attention. But of course houses caught fire and burned for reasons that had nothing to do with the Blitz, and even in the face of Armageddon, there are still private Armageddons to be faced." ***

"Mail Order Clone" is about, well, a mail order clone, and the problems it causes for the man who orders it.**

"Samaritan" - A young assistant pastor plunges the church hierarchy into a storm of controversy when she brings forward an orangutan who can use sign language to be baptized.**

"Blued Moon" - A romantic comedy interwoven with an sf plot which involves a controversy over a project at chemical plant to restore the ozone layer and a series of coincidences with a scientific cause.***


View all my reviews

Review: Two Plays for Voices (repost from GoodReads, 2016)

Two Plays for Voices by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This full cast audio CD includes 2 short stories previously published in Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions. There are some gruesome bits in both stories, but I didn't find them gratuitous. The highlight is definitely "Murder Mysteries" which I think is the best of Gaiman’s short stories that he's written outside of comics.

"Snow, Glass, Apples" is a retelling of Snow White, from the stepmother’s point of view, in which (view spoiler)[Snow White is a vampire (hide spoiler)] It’s elegant and creepy - this version really isn’t a children’s story, any more than the original was. The basic idea is one I’ve seen before, though. Tanith Lee did it first in "Red As Blood," Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer although that one has a very different ending. I'd probably give this 3 stars if I were rating it separately.

"Murder Mysteries" is a story within a story. In the frame story, the narrator, a British man, remembers a time when he was stuck in Los Angeles while trying to get back home. He briefly hooks up with an old girlfriend, and after leaving her apartment he meets an old man who tells him a story in exchange for some cigarettes. The old man claims that he was once the angel Raguel, charged with carrying out the Lord’s vengeance. He explains how he investigated the first crime in the history of the universe, the murder of an angel in the Silver City, the precursor of Heaven. There was no obvious motive, so there was no obvious suspect -- but Raguel was willing to interview everyone in the City if he had to.

The full cast performance is absolutely captivating, and the eerie music is great.

"Perhaps it is true that all that happens is in accordance with Your Will, and thus it is good. But sometimes You leave blood on Your instruments."

View all my reviews

Review: Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (repost from GoodReads, 2017)

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The highlights of this collection, for me, were "The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains," "A Calendar of Tales" and "The Sleeper and the Spindle" (the last of which I'd listened to before, as a separate audio CD).

"A Lunar Labyrinth" - An atmospheric, slightly creepy story. Gaiman mentions in the introduction that it's an homage to Gene Wolfe’s “A Solar Labyrinth” which I have now had a chance to read. The Wolfe story is available online with the permission of the author:
http://ultan.org.uk/a-solar-labyrinth/

(The Wolfe story is excellent - one of those stories that is more unsettling for the things it never quite spells out.)

"The Thing About Cassandra" - This was clever. A man meets a woman from out of his high school fantasies. There’s an additional twist, but I won’t give it away…

"Down to a Sunless Sea" - A creepy story about a sea voyage. This one is available online, and I had read it before.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

"The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains" - This might be the best story in the collection, and probably has my favorite opening of all of them. It’s a dark story of revenge, love, and loss.

You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city. During that year I forbade her name to be mentioned, and if her name entered my prayers when I prayed, it was to ask that she would one day learn the meaning of what she had done, of the dishonour that she had brought to my family, of the red that ringed her mother’s eyes.

I hate myself for that, and nothing will ease that, not even what happened that night, on the side of the mountain.

"Orange" - A whimsical story in which a girl explains her sister’s encounter with aliens in her answers to a police interview. I thought bits of this were pretty funny.

"A Calendar of Tales" - I really enjoyed this. It’s a series of very short stories, one for each month of the year. "April" was funny; "August" is a pretty good disaster story; "September" is eerie.
This one is online, with audio and text, at:
http://www.acalendaroftales.com/

"The Case of Death and Honey" - A Sherlock Holmes story, featuring Old Gao, a Chinese beekeeper, who tolerates the extended visit of an elderly white man who comes to study his bees. The man is Sherlock Holmes…

"The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury" - This was written in honor of Ray Bradbury, and it works in a bunch of references to Bradbury’s work. It’s a strange story about a man who is losing his memory.

"An Invocation of Incuriosity" - Gaiman says in his introduction that this one was written for a collection of stories inspired by Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, and it does have that feel to it. (I've read some of those stories, but only the first volume.) The narrator meets a mysterious ancient being at a flea market.

"The Sleeper and the Spindle" - I like this one a lot. I listened to it last year as a separate audio CD. This is a fairytale retelling, combining elements from Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. The story starts with a recovered Snow White as queen of her own kingdom, and with three nameless dwarves, all that remain of the original seven dwarves. The dwarves discover that a neighboring kingdom is falling under some sort of sleeping spell; the princess there has been cursed many years before, and the curse, which was at first confined to the princess’s castle, is slowly spreading to cover the whole land. Snow White, having previously broken the sleeping spell that was placed on her (this is backstory, and there isn’t much said about it - I would have liked a bit more detail) travels to the neighboring kingdom to rescue the princess.

Black Dog - A longer story set in the universe of American Gods. It was pretty good, but my attention wandered a bit during this one, maybe because of length or maybe because I'm not a fan of that book - I didn’t finish it - and so I wasn't as engaged by this one as a lot of Gaiman’s other readers probably would be.

View all my reviews

Review: Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), also known as Koizumi Yakumo after gaining Japanese citizenship, was best known for his books about Japan. He was born in Greece and raised in England, and moved to Japan in 1890. Kwaidan is a book of Japanese ghost stories. The last three chapters are studies on Chinese and Japanese folklore about insects (butterflies, ants, and mosquitoes). Most of the tales are collected and translated from old Japanese texts. one of the stories -- Yuki-onna, or The Snow-Woman -- was told to him by a farmer in Musashi Province, and Hearn could not determine whether it had been recorded before.

There are twenty stories in this book. I enjoyed all of them, but my favorites were:

"Of a mirror & a bell:" A woman kills herself and her ghost haunts a bell that was made of the metal from her mirror.
"The dream of Akinosuke:" A man has a dream in which he becomes governor of the mysterious island of Raishu.

Both have twist endings, which I won't spoil.

I found this book on a list of early Gothic novels & ghost stories at GoodReads. This is one of my books for the Back to the Classics Challenge, Category: Classic from Africa, Asia, or Oceania. And it is my first book for RIP XIV, a September-October challenge to read horror, gothic fiction, and suspense.

It is in the public domain, so you can find it at Project Gutenberg.

View all my reviews

Deal Me In: The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains

This is one of my cards for the Deal Me In Challenge: the 7 of Hearts, which is the suit I dedicated to stories on audio. I was keeping up with my list until I fell behind in May. I will try to catch up this month by reading two at a time for a while.

I have read this short story before and listened to the audiobook twice now.

The audio version is read by the author with musical accompaniment by the FourPlay String Quartet. It is an hour and 23 minutes. I loved the audio reading. I would like to listen to more of Gaiman's audio books. (I listened to Norse Mythology earlier this year.) Apparently there is an illustrated version as well. 

I think this is one of Gaiman's best short stories. It is set in Scotland.

“You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city. During that year I forbade her name to be mentioned, and if her name entered my prayers when I prayed, it was to ask that she would one day learn the meaning of what she had done, of the dishonour that she had brought to my family, of the red that ringed her mother’s eyes.”

The narrator describes himself as a "wee man" (and later, as a dwarf). His mother was human, and so is his wife. He can run faster than ordinary men, and he can communicate with spirits. He  hires a man named Calum McInnes to be his guide to a cave in the black mountains. The cave is known for its gold, but the locals avoid it. They say that taking the gold corrupts you. The narrator is not concerned about this because the gold is not what he wants from this trip, anyway.

The story is delightfully creepy, and apparently there is also an illustrated version. I would like to read it sometime. 

“I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.

I say that, but my time on the Misty Isle, that is also called, by the wise, the Winged Isle, reminds me of nothing but itself.

It is a day from that jetty until you reach the black mountains.” 

Deal Me In: March Stories Read (4)

Here are the stories I read in March!

Spades: Contemporary Science Fiction

John M. Ford, "Heat of Fusion"

This is a new author for me. The story is told through diary entries of a man with terminal radiation poisoning. This is a hard one to describe... it's intense, and very internally focused, with very little setting description. This one is captivating. 

Robert L Forward: "The Singing Diamond"

A search for valuable ores in the Asteroid Belt leads to the discovery of a diamond disk with life in it. 

This probably the most boring story I have read for this challenge, and that's all I'm going to say about that. The SF Encyclopedia notes that this is Robert Forward's first published story, so maybe he wrote better ones later on, but I'm not sure why the editors were so impressed with it. Its just missing something, I'm afraid. 

Bruce Sterling: "The Beautiful & the Sublime" 

I have heard of Bruce Sterling before, but I don't think I have read anything by him. This is a far-future story that looks at how AI might transform society. The central plot, though, is about the building of an aircraft that mimics the flight of a dragonfly. The really revolutionary thing about it, from the point of view of the characters, is that the craft is designed to fly without a computer:

"Why?" I said. "What happened to its controls?"
Somps grinned for the first time, exposing long, narrow teeth. "They haven't been invented yet. I mean, there aren't algorithms for its wing kinematics. Four wings flapping -- it generates lift through vortex-dominated flow fields. You've seen dragonflies..."

I liked this bit where the narrator reflects on the history of science:

"... I confess that I felt the loss of those glory days, which we now see, in hindsight, as the last sunset glow of the Western analytic method. Those lost battalions of scientists, technicians, engineers!
Of course, to the modern temperament, this lopsided emphasis on rational thought seems stifling. Admittedly machine intelligence has its limits; it's not capable of those human bursts of insight that once advanced scientific knowledge by leaps and bounds. The march of science is not the methodical crawling of robots.

But who misses it?"

I will not spoil it, but I definitely recommend this one if you can find it. 

Hearts: Stories on Audio

HG Wells: "The Crystal Egg"

The main character, Mr. Cave,  owns an antique shop. One antique item that comes into his possession is a crystal egg. One night he observes a light coming from the egg and examines it. For a moment, he has a glimpse of  "a view of a wide and spacious and strange country" but soon the view vanishes. After a while, he starts to suspect that the crystal egg is showing the planet Mars. After that... well, there are some mysterious happenings, but I guess I was expecting something more dramatic. I have read The Time Machine,  The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The War of the Worlds, and those books had a similar feel to the classic horror of the same era (Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, ect). This is the first short story I have read by him, and it is very low-key in comparison to those novels. I liked it, but it did not blow me away. 

Review: The Happy Prince & Other Stories

The Happy Prince & Other Stories by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This little book includes three fables that Oscar Wilde wrote shortly after the birth of his children. Wikipedia says that these are children's stories, but... The Nightingale and the Rose? Really? That one just doesn't seem like a children's story to me. But its the last of the three stories, so I am getting ahead of myself. I should say a bit about the other two stories first.

The Happy Prince -- In this story, the soul of a dead prince inhabits a gilded statue. He recalls how, during his life, he was sheltered and kept ignorant of the suffering of his city's residents. Now that he is dead, he sets out to alleviate their misery. He enlists the help of a migrating swallow who stops to rest in the city on his way south. I was reminded a bit of the story of the Buddha, who grew up as a prince. During his early life is said to have been shielded from the knowledge of suffering, until he left his palace to meet his subjects.

The Selfish Giant -- This is the story of a giant who prevents the children of a nearby town from playing in his beautiful garden. His selfishness causes the garden to wither until he learns his lesson.

The Nightingale and the Rose, illustration from Wikimedia Commons

The Nightingale & the Rose -- This tale is definitely the highlight of this little book. In this story, a nightingale overhears a student complaining that the professor's daughter has refused to dance with him unless he gives her a red rose, and he has no red roses in his garden. The nightingale feels sorry for him and sets out to help him. I don't want to give too much away about this story, but if you are interested in a more detailed discussion, check out Mari Ness's insightful commentary on this story over at Tor.com. It is one of her blog posts for the series "On Fairy Tales."


View all my reviews

Deal Me In: January-Febuary stories read (7)

This is what I have read so far for the short stories/poetry selections I planned for the Deal Me In challenge, except for  the poem "The Eve of St Agnes." I already wrote a separate post about that one. 

Clubs: Classic Science Fiction

Raymond Z. Gallun: "Davy Jones's Ambassador" 1935 1/15/2019

I really liked this one! This is an early first contact story (about first contact with aliens, that is) set at the bottom of the ocean, rather than in space. It is clever, imaginative and a bit sad. Probably my favorite of those I have read so far. 

James Blish: "Surface Tension" 1952 1/28/2019 

Discovering that the sun will soon explode, scientists create microhumans who can live in a drop of water. This was ok, but not quite as good as the previous story, I thought.

Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" 1943 2/19/2019

This story is about children who discover another dimension. The editors' introduction says: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" is one of his [Kuttner's] genre masterpieces, in which he alludes to Lewis Carroll (and invokes Carrolls play with mathematical logic) as he parodies the advanced theories of child psychologists and the educational toy industry. If geometric sense really is learned by children at an early age by interacting with the world, most especially with their toys, what if they got toys from the fourth dimension? 

Kate Wilhelm "The Planners" 1968 2/23/2019 
Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Short Story
This is basically a mad scientist story. I didn't think this was anything special, I'm afraid, but I will wait and see if it has any interesting parallels or connection with the other stories I haven't read yet. 

Spades: Contemporary Science Fiction 

Gregory Benford "Exposures" 1982 2/5/2019

Kind of a slice of life story, except that the characters are astronomers. This wasn't a bad story, but it was a bit dry.  

Hearts: Stories on Audio

Peter Beagle: We Never Talk About My Brother Podcastle podcast 
2/17/2019

This is probably not my favorite Peter Beagle story; that's probably either "Come Lady Death" or "Salt Wine" (which I read years ago in The Line Between). This is a story about someone who can make stories come true. It is a little bit eerie, but not quite a horror story. As in "Salt Wine," there's a great narrator, but for some reason, the other aspects of the story weren't quite as compelling to me. I have 3 more Podcastle stories on my Deal Me In list, and I might listen to more of them next year. 

Natalia Theodoridou: The Birding: A Fairy Tale
World Fantasy Award Winner for Short Fiction: 2018 
Strange Horizons podcast (click through to listen or read the story)
2/28/2019

The premise of this story is a plague that is turning people into birds. The narrator, Maria, lives in contemporary Greece. She tries to avoid the plague and tells a story about birds to her unborn child, which will eventually dovetail (ha!) with the frame story. This was weird, maybe a bit too surreal for my taste. 

Deal Me In Challenge list for 2019

This challenge is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis. For this challenge, you select 52 stories to read in 2019 and then assign each of them to a card in a deck of cards, drawing one card each week and then reading the story that matches the card.

The stories for the first 2 suits are from The Ascent of Wonder: the Evolution of Hard SF, edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. I selected these using the Wikipedia page, which makes it easy to see the year of publication for each story. The table of contents in the book itself is not in chronological order, for some strange reason. I'll probably read the whole book by the end of the year, but I will use this challenge to decide which stories to read first.

I am not sure if I can read all of these, but if I have to change something I will probably cut back on another challenge. After all, this one is probably one of the easier challenges to fit into the year, especially since I have designated one of my suits for stories on audio. 

I probably won't review all of these, but I will do a few round-up posts.

Clubs: Classic SF Short Stories

A - H.G. Wells: "The Land Ironclads" 1903
2 - Rudyard Kipling: "With the Night Mail" 1909
3 - Don A Stuart: "Atomic Power" 1934 4/15/2019

4 - Raymond Z. Gallun: "Davy Jones's Ambassador" 1935 1/15/2019
5 - Hal Clement:  "Proof” 1942 8/6/2019
6 - Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" 1943 2/19/2019
7 - Raymond F. Jones: "The Person from Porlock" 1947

8 - Philip Latham: "The Xi Effect" 1950 6/23/2019

9 - Arthur C. Clarke: "The Star" 1955 7/28/2019

10 - James Blish: "Surface Tension" 1952   1/28/2019
J - Katherine Maclean: "The Snowball Effect" 1952
Q - Philip K. Dick: "The Indefatigable Frog" 1953
K  - J.G. Ballard: "Cage of Sand" 1963 8/31/2019

Spades: Contemporary SF Short Stories 

(using a broad definition of "contemporary": 1968-present)

A - Kate Wilhelm "The Planners" 1968  2/23/2019
2 - Poul Anderson "Kyrie" 1969 8/7/2019
3 - Gregory Benford "Exposures" 1982 2/5/2019
4 - Theodore Sturgeon "Occam's Scalpel" 1971  4/15/2019

5 - J.G. Ballard "Prima Belladonna" 1971

6 - Ursula K. Le Guin "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" 1974 (reread)
7 - Ian Watson "The Very Slow Time Machine" 1978 8/15/2019
8 - Robert L. Forward "The Singing Diamond" 1979  3/14/2019
9 - William Gibson "Johnny Mnemonic" 1981
10 - Bruce Sterling "The Beautiful & the Sublime" 1986 4/1/2019
J  - Gene Wolfe "Procreation" 1984
Q  - John M. Ford "Heat of Fusion" 1984 3/9/2019
K - Gene Wolfe "All the Hues of Hell" 1987 4/29/2019

Diamonds: Poetry

A - John Keats: The Eve of St. Agnes     2/13/2019 
2 - Percy Shelley: Ode to the West Wind (reread) 
3 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (reread) 
4 - John Greenleaf Whittier: Snowbound 
5 - Tennyson: Ulysses (reread) 7/31/2019
6 - Tennyson: The Lotus-Eaters 5/19/2019
7 - Arthur Hugh Clough: Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth 
8 - W.B. Yeats: The Song of Wandering Aengus (reread)
9 - Yeats: Easter 1916 (reread) 

10 - Pablo Neruda: Explicar Algunas Cosas (I Explain a Few Things) (reread) 7/25/2019

J - Neruda: Canto a la madres de los milicianos muertos (Songs for the Mothers of Slain Militiamen)

Q - Neruda: Oda a la critica (Ode to Criticism) 

K - Neruda: Oda a la sal (Ode to Salt)

Hearts: Stories on audio 

A - Edgar Allen Poe: A Descent into the Maelstrom LibriVox
2 - Nathaniel Hawthorne: Rappaccinis Daughter LibriVox 8/2/2019
3 - Jules Verne: In the Year 2889 LibriVox
4 - HG Wells:  The Star LibriVox 6/28/2019
5 - HG Wells: The Crystal Egg LibriVox 3/23/2019
6 - Algernon Blackwood: A Victim of Higher Space LibriVox 
7 - Neil Gaiman: The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains - library audio (downloadable ebook) (reread) 6/1/2019
8 - Natalia Theodoridou: The Birding: A Fairy Tale: Strange Horizons podcast (World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction 2018) 2/28/2019
9 - Peter Beagle: Come Lady Death Podcastle podcast (reread)
10 - John Crowley: Snow 
Lightspeed podcast (http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/snow/) 4/14/2019
J - Peter Beagle: We Never Talk About My Brother Podcastle podcast 2/17/2019
Q  - NK Jemisin: Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Under the Still Waters Podcastle podcast [found on this page: http://podcastle.org/new-to-podcastle]
K -  Ken Liu: The Paper Menagerie Podcastle podcast

The Friday 56 & Book Beginnings

hosted by Freda's Voice

I still need to review Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr.

In the meantime, my book for the Friday 56 is the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.

from the synopsis:
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.

from page 56 ("Mothers"):

I believe in a world where impossible things happen. Where love can outstrip brutality, can neutralize it, as though it never was, or transform it into something new and even more beautiful. Where love can outdo nature.



For Book Beginnings, which is hosted by Rose City Reader, I'm sharing the beginning of the first story in the collection (and my favorite so far), "The Husband Stitch," an adult version of the classic children’s story "The Green Ribbon."

(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices:
Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.
The boy who will grow into a man, and be my spouse: robust with his own good fortune.
My father: Like your father, or the man you wish was your father.
My son: as a small child, gentle, rounded with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband.
All other women: interchangeable with my own.)

*

In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them. I am at a neighbor’s party with my parents, and I am seventeen. Though my father didn’t notice, I drank half a glass of white wine in the kitchen a few minutes ago, with the neighbor’s teenage daughter. Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting...


This story was published in Granta in 2014. You can read it here.

I've read the first four stories in the collection, and I have four left.

Review: Tales of Moonlight and Rain

Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A wonderful collection of strange and elegant stories from 18th century Japan. The title ("Ugetsu Monogatari," or "Rain-Moon Tales") alludes to the beig that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with a lingering moon. These nine stories are based on earlier versions of Chinese tales. Ueda Akinari retold these stories in a Japanese setting.

The highlights for me were probably "The Chysanthemum Vow" and "The Reed-Choked House."

For a more detailed review, I think The Guardian has one that gives a good overview of the book:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...

The Japanese word for this kind of tale is kaidan, which means "narrating the strange": a lower-key, more delicate enterprise, in other words, than the bloodcurdling designs of Walpole and his followers, and closer perhaps to what we now think of as "the uncanny".

View all my reviews