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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

One Thousand and One-Second Stories

Inagaki Taruho

Translated from the Japanese with an Introduction by Tricia Vita

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Digital Only

A Sun & Moon title.

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"Taruho is one of the few I can call a genius in Japanese literature.... He has a spot equivalent to the astronauts in history. There is Before Taruho & After Taruho."
--Yukio Mishima

Dubbed by the Japanese as "the 21st Century's Dandy," Inagaki Taruho writes short and incredibly concentrated stories of his favorite things: machines, airplanes, modern fairies, Saturn, falling stars, the tin moon, geometrical shapes, boys, policemen, aromatic Turkish cigarettes, black cats who turn into smoke, crashing comets, gay bars, and numerous other subjects which run throughout his tales. Writing from the 1920s to the 1970s, Inagaki is a true original, seen by many Japanese as the equal in talent of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima, and as one of the great Japanese writers of the 20th century.

Translator Tricia Vita has brilliantly translated Inagaki's debut masterpiece for the first time into English, and the result is a book destined to charm and amaze Western readers. Also included are selections from Soap Bubble Stories (1923), Tokyo Attractions That Should Be Missed (1925), Five Tales by Taruho (1925), Stories from the Third Hemisphere (1927), and The Collected Poetry of Taruho.

Book Review(s)

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, June 1, 1998

by Staff Writer

Consisting almost entirely of pieces written during the 1920s, this collection brings the eccentric, influential work of Taruho into English for the first time. Recalling Albert Giraud's poetry cycle “Pierrot Lunaire,” Taruho's “stories” seem closer to surreal prose poems than to conventional short stories. Most weigh in at less than a page. Clearly as influenced by French symbolist poetry as by Japanese literary traditions, Taruho presents an interesting hybrid, and his work also shows a distinctive fascination with technology. Because the pieces are linked by shared imagery (the moon, pistols, the stars, the color blue) rather than by coherent narrative, they occasionally fall into repetition or forced whimsy. Despite these flaws, Taruho creates an original, odd, delightful world in which almost anything can happen. This publication of Taruho's work offers a valuable glimpse into the mind of an unusual Japanese writer better known in his own country than abroad, of whom the more exportable Yukio Mishima observed, “There is Before Taruho and After Taruho.” Vita provides an informative biographical and literary introduction.

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