Night train to the stars

Japanese fairy tales – enchanting, enigmatic stories of animals, human beings and the great natural world. Dark and innocent, sublime and whimsical, Miyazawa’s stories have the ageless feel of the best fairy tales. There are animal allegories like ‘The Ungrateful Rat’ where a rude rodent insults all the objects he meets – until he meets the Rat Trap. There are morality tales like ‘The Restaurant of Many Orders’, where two hunters become the hunted. There are also transcendent stories of childhood and mortality like Miyazawa’s best-known ‘Night Train to the Stars’, where a magical steam train carries children through the night up to the heavens. These stories reveal the unique brilliance of one of Japan’s most beloved early twentieth-century writers.