"Shono conveys both intimacy and distance, tranquility and tension, as he explores the shifting relations between husband and wife, father and son, brother and sister." -Publishers Weekly

"These stories are so artful... they seem like the artless productions of life itself." -Kenyon College Book Review -- Kenyon College Book Review

"This collection should be sipped and savored like warm sake." -Small Press

Winner of the Pen Center West Award, this delicate collection of thirteen linked tales reveals the flow of daily life in the modern Japanese family. Junzo Shono's artful layering of commonplace events, images, and conversations has been compared to haiku poetry crossed with an Ozu film.

Junzo Shono was born in 1921 and lived in Kawasaki, Japan. His works have won numerous literary awards, including the Yomiuri Prize for Evening Clouds.

Wayne P. Lammers is a translator of Japanese into English. Lammers grew up in Japan in an American household, using English at home and Japanese everywhere else. After building on this bilingual foundation by specializing in Japanese studies in college and graduate school, he taught Japanese language, literature, and culture at the university level for a number of years.