In the Shade of Spring Leaves: The Life of Higuchi Ichiyo, with Nine of Her Best Stories

After celebrating a golden age that was hundreds of years ahead of other civilized nations, women in Japan quickly fell from the cultural vanguard they had enjoyed during the Heian and were silent throughout the succession of bakufu governments that ended with the Meiji restoration in 1868. Ichiyo is widely credited as one of the first female voices to re-emerge after this extended silence. Though her career was cut short by her early death, several of her short stories are still in wide circulation in Japan and elsewhere. The beauty of this book is that it not only includes her own writings but also a rather deftly crafted biography. It has been my experience that non-Japanophiles tend to shy away from Japanese literature for lack of understanding the culture. The inclusion of the biography in this work makes it more approachable for those wishing to delve into the world of Japanese literature without undertaking a study of Japan's history and culture.

Very illustrative or how Asian stories describing feelings gvary from Western which emphasize action

this book includes multiple narrative stories that allows readers to understand japanese people and their culture through different perspectives.. storylines are good too

I found this author thanks to my mentor Daisaku Ikeda.

Great translation work. Inspiring read.

Higuchi Ichiyo lived the classic tragic writer's life-- poverty, a struggle for success, death by tuberculosis at 23. She is considered to be the first professional female writer in Japan. She is an extremely popular literary figure in Japan-- her popularity due to both the quality of her work and her all too short life.This book contains a critical biography written by the late Robert Lyons Danly. He also translated and anthologized nine of her short stories in the volume. The critical biography is concise and informative, if a little bit on the dry side. The biography is spiced with little bits of her journals.The selection of stories spans the career of the writer, moving from her most unformed and derivative work to her more mature stories of the floating world. Some of the stories are stunning (particularly "Child's Play"). It is difficult not to wish that Higuchi Ichiy' could have survived to a more advanced age and a more developed voice.Recommended reading for those with an interest in Japanese literature.

Deservedly, this 19th century's woman's writings are considered some of the greatest in the world. Robert Danly has done a wonderful job of bringing Ichiyo to us. Out of a different time and world, he has still managed to make her accessible to an English reader.The first half of the book is devoted to biographical material about Japan's unique and memorable real-life heroine. The second half presents nine of her short stories in translation. Each story its own literary jewel.I've read thousands of books and this is one of my most treasured.

This is the only substantial collection of Higuchi's short stories currently available in English. Giving you 9 stories that give a sense of her range. Unlike much Japanese fiction, these stories are not confined to the social world of the elites in a highly hierarchical society. A number of the stories explore the lives of socially disadvantaged and excluded. But they manage to do so in a way which combines an exploration of the fragility of human existence with a sense of poetry and pathos. There is often a wistful tone, and an evocative attention to poignant details. This collection is preceded by an extensive biography of the author, which mines the stories for biographical detail on the tough life of one of Japan's first major female authors of the modern age. Personally, I was much more interested in the stories, and while I can appreciate the work that's gone into the biographical research, I don't really see how the life illuminates the stories. The stories also come with notes, but most of these again relate to the author's life or cross reference to other stories - sometime to ones that follow in the collection, which is frustrating if you want the stories to work their magic before you dig deeper - rather than explaining any detail of the Japanese culture/context. Nevertheless I am a fan of the translations themselves. I can't judge them for their accuracy against the Japanese, but Higuchi's short stories do seem ambitious in their mingling of the poetic, the gritty, and the poignant, and the translator finds an effective style to make these elements work together.I should add that Higuchi seems little known in accounts of Japanese literature in English. While there are a number of classics of Japanese literature from many centuries ago written by women - the Pillow Book, or Tales of Genji, for example - and there has been a fanatastic post-war flourishing of great women writers, I hadn't read much in between. So it's great to find a writer with such a careful eye, putting life into the accounts of men and women in the late !9th century, at a pivotal moment in the transformation of Japanese society.Instead they explore fragility and the pathos of lives

I got the book on recommendation from Seiji Noma San and what he says goes.. Goes!

Highly recommend. I have to say one of the most interesting books I have ever read. One of the most important figures of Japanese literature and rightly so.