Translator: Holman, J. Martin

Twenty-three stories by a Japanese writer. The subjects include beggars, Buddhist priests and love dramas. The story, Diary of My Sixteenth Year, is on the friendship of a boy and his grandfather.

This novel tells the story of Chieko, the adopted daughter of a Kyoto kimono designer, Takichiro, and his wife, Shige. Since her youth, Chieko has been told that she was kidnapped as a baby by the couple in a moment of profound desire. When she is twenty, however, she learns that she was actually a…