Translation Works
To Japanese
The 2nd Selected Works
TITLE
The Glass Slipper and Other Stories
(Garasu no kutsu hoka)
AUTHOR
Shotaro Yasuoka
Translator
ENGLISH / Royall Tyler published
Originally Published by:
Kodansha (1989) (pb)
KEY POINTS
  • A collection of outstanding short stories including the debut work, "The Glass Slipper," which was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize
SYNOPSIS
A collection of short stories that masterfully and realistically portray the perspectives of people in post-war Japan
 
As a night watchman at a hunting gun shop, I work nights guarding against thefts and fires. As I am physically weak, I will not be of much use if robbers come barging in, but I tentatively have this job based on the assumption that such a robbery will not actually happen. At the request of the shop owner, I deliver a shotgun for hunting birds to the house of an American military doctor, and there I meet the maid of the house, Etsuko. Etsuko says the doctor and his wife are going to go away on vacation for several months and asks me to come visit her from time to time. I gradually come to feel love for her. We begin meeting frequently, and my youthful passion for Etsuko burns fiercely as she manipulates me with various bogus stories. ("The Glass Slipper")
 
When I am in fifth grade, I transfer from an elementary school in Hirosaki to a school in Tokyo's Aoyama district. Since most of the new school's graduates get accepted by leading junior high schools, my mother is very enthusiastic about my admission here.
In Hirosaki, I was treated like a model student simply on the strength of my ability to read out loud in standard Japanese. Since moving to Tokyo, I am still considered pretty good at reading textbooks, but I'm totally lost when it comes to mathematics and sciences and cannot keep up with my classes in those subjects.
Compared to Hirosaki, the summer vacation period of the Tokyo school is very long, and I get bored. I go to the bathhouse every afternoon, and it seems that I spend most of my time every day in the steamy bathhouse atmosphere.
About a week before the end of the vacation period, I encounter my classmate Okuma at the bathhouse, and he asks me how much progress I've made with the summer vacation homework assignments. Having left the assignment sheets piled in a corner of my room up to now, I now have to begin struggling with a mountain of homework. ("Homework")
 
GENRE: Literary fiction
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