Great Japanese Stories: 10 Parallel Texts

A captivating selection of short stories in the original Japanese alongside their English translations This new dual-language edition of ten stories selected from The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories celebrates some of the very best twentieth-century literature from Japan. Each story appears in the original Japanese alongside an expert English translation, providing unique cultural insight and literary inspiration for language learners. Ranging from a witty send-up of modern social graces to a powerful evocation of the aftermath of the atomic bomb, this remarkable collection includes works from beloved authors Abe Akira, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Betsuyaku Minoru, Hoshi Shinichi, Kawakami Mieko, Kono Taeko, Murakami Hakuri, Ohba Minako, Ota Yoko and Uchida Hyakken.

Jay Rubin (b. 1941) is an American academic, translator, and (as of 2015) novelist. He is best known for his translations of the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. He has written about Murakami, the novelist Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), the short story writers Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908) and Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), prewar Japanese literary censorship, Noh drama, and Japanese grammar. In May 2015 Chin Music Press published his novel THE SUN GODS, set in Seattle against the background of the incarceration of 120,000 U.S. citizens and non-citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

Rubin has a Ph.D. in Japanese literature from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Washington for eighteen years, and then moved to Harvard University, from which he retired in 2006. He lives near Seattle, where he continues to write and translate.