Kamusari Tales Told at Night

Shion Miura made her fiction debut in 2000 with Kakuto suru mono ni maru (A Passing Grade for Those Who Fight). In 2006, she won the Naoki Prize for her story collection Mahoro ekimae Tada Benriken (The Handymen in Mahoro Town). Her other novels include Kaze ga tsuyoku fuiteiru (The Wind Blows Hard), Kogure-so monogatari (The Kogure Apartments), and Ano ie ni kurasu yonin no onna (The Four Women Living in That House). Her other works in English, all translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, include The Easy Life in Kamusari (Kamusari naanaa nichijo), volume one in her Forest series, and The Great Passage (Fune o amu), which was made into an award-winning motion picture and received both the Booksellers’ Award in Japan in 2012 and an Earphones Award. Miura has also published more than fifteen collections of essays and is a manga aficionado.Juliet Winters Carpenter is a professor emerita of Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts. Her first translated novel, Secret Rendezvous by Kobo Abe, received the 1980 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. In 2014, her translation of A True Novel by Minae Mizumura received the same award. Besides Shion Miura’s The Great Passage and two-volume Forest series, Carpenter’s recent translations include Mizumura’s An I-Novel, Keiichiro Hirano’s At the End of the Matinee, and Tōru Haga’s Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603–1853. Her forthcoming translations include Masatsugu Ono’s At the Edge of the Wood and Kiyoko Murata’s A Woman of Pleasure. Carpenter lives on Whidbey Island in Washington State.

Praise for The Easy Life in Kamusari“Fans of all ages should enjoy the author’s blend of the traditional and the contemporary…In a battle of Japanese settings, wondrous mountains win big over bustling cities.” —Kirkus ReviewsPraise for The Great PassageWinner of an Earphones Award, Fiction“Mastery of words may not result in masterly communication, and a great dictionary, like a love story, is ‘the result of people puzzling over their choices’—a classic tension that has made The Great Passage a prizewinner in Japan, as well as both a successful feature film and an animated television series.” —The New York Times“Swirling with witty enchantment, The Great Passage proves to be, well, utterly great. Readers should be advised to get ready to sigh with delighted satisfaction and awe-inspiring admiration.” —Booklist (starred review)“The Great Passage has a philosophy of thoughtfulness and dedication to words that any reader will understand…Miura’s prose—and Carpenter’s translation—glides along, smooth and precise, with flashes of quiet poetry.” —Metropolis“The Great Passage is interwoven with romantic love stories, but ultimately it is the passion of the characters, their friendship, and their devotion to their task that direct and complete the narrative and turn it from simply a good book to a great one.” —Talia Franks, Three Percent