À Kinosaki

by Naoya Shiga, Marc Mécréant (Translator)

秤屋ではたらく小僧の仙吉は、番頭たちの噂話を聞いて、屋台の鮨屋にむかったもののお金が足りず、お鮨は食べられなかった上に恥をかく。ところが数日後。仙吉のお店にやってきた紳士が、お鮨をたらふくご馳走してくれたのだった！　はたしてこの紳士の正体は……？　小僧の体験をユーモアたっぷりに描く「小僧の神様」、作者自身の経験をもとに綴られた「城の崎にて」など、作者のもっとも実りの多き時期に描かれた充実の作品集。(C)KAMAWANU CO.,LTD.All Rights Reserved

Genres: Literature

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1917

About the author

Naoya Shiga (志賀 直哉) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer active during the Taishō and Showa periods of Japan.

Reviews

[Ami Iida · Rating 4 out of 5]

小僧の神様は贈与論を小説化したものです

[KENICHI YAMANOBE · Rating 3 out of 5]

2/3読了2/9感想★★★☆☆城崎温泉に行く道すから、旅情をかきたてるために読んだ▶︎心境小説…作者が日常生活で目に触れたものを描きながら、その中に自己の心境を調和のとれた筆致で表現▶︎”彼”の心理描写を著者自身を重ねて、深掘りする。なるほど面白い。そして、ぼんやりそれぞれの短編が幕を閉じる。物語の続きは、現実にどこかで進んでいるんだろうなと思えるような不思議な感覚▶︎複雑だけど、”あぁ、この感覚前にどこかで—“みたいな描写に引き込まれる。生と死、男性心理と女性心理、句読点の位置など、古典から学ぶことは多い。

[Georgia Clair · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short story evokes such a sense of sonder in the reader I absolutely loved it!

[Oussama ben ayad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am sitting in my living room alone. I just ate my dinner, which was the same as yesterday's. I have started thinking about tomorrow, just as I did yesterday evening, and I think a subconscious awareness of the repetitiveness of my life dawned upon me as I got ready to go to bed. then I remembered that a few months ago I stumbled upon this writer and downloaded this short story. I opened my laptop and I searched for it. It was very difficult to find because I did not even remember the name of the writer, but I searched and searched until I found it.
I read on....
As I write these words I feel the pressure of needing to go to sleep, because tomorrow I have things to do, and I felt the pressure as I was reading this short story too, and then Naoya Shiga started talking about the wasp, and I felt in my suicidal workaholic attitude the same indifference for life which the wasps show to the dead one as they toil their days away, unaware that the lifeless corpse lying meekly before their eyes is the light towards which they toil every day from dawn to dusk. Like Shiga, I have also witnessed a lot of animals die. But two stuck with me. The first one was when I was about ten. I was walking with my father and we saw a cat stuck under a truck as the driver continued to drive back, unaware of the cat's struggles and cries for life. I was shocked to see my father running and screaming to alert the driver. I think I had just realized that death was universal and that it scared all of us and its sight pushed us unwillingly towards action. The second time it was a pigeon I had that got sick, and my friends told me to just slit its throat and feed it to cats, or else it would infect the other pigeons and they would all die. Unbeknownst to me, the knife my friends had given me was dull, and it simply unveiled my intentions to the bird which was now torn between the confusion of its illness and the horrors of the knife that had just crushed its throat without slicing it, adding only to its distress and to its breathing difficulties. I remember that I wanted to kill it with my hands to prove to my friends that I was a man, but when I saw it open its mouth in a desperate attempt to breathe, my strength dissolved into a feeling of what Julia Kristeva likes to call an abject. As it struggled to catch its breath I not only realized my failure to kill it swiftly, but I had also, and much worse, realized that I had caused it to suffer the worst of horrors. To me at least that would be the worst of horrors. I do not know if animals experience horror. I think they do. And if they do, then that animal must have experienced so much horror, realizing that what I had just failed to do was about to be repeated but successfully, and knowing itself to be helpless in the face of this impending fate. A friend then took the dull knife, and he continued the same mechanical slicing movement, and the bird suffered what words fail to accommodate. Then the traumatizing calmness of death blessed the black pigeon with white dots and took its life away. All of these terrible memories gushed through my mind painfully as I read the story of Naoya Shiga, and they reminded me of the arbitrariness of death and the unexpectedness of trauma. Now, having taken these thoughts off of my mind with this text which I know isn't a review, I can go to sleep and hope not to suffer from these hyper-visual dreams that have disturbed my sleep recently. I hope I have left all the residues of my childhood in the pages of every story of suffering that I have read. But still, I can't help but think of the black pigeon which, because of me, suffered what I would only imagine in my worst nightmares, and I can't help but think of the rat and the water lizard in Shiga's story; and just like him, when I compare these unsettling images of death with my memories of the times when I was most alive, I fail to see where death ends and were life takes the lead.

[Iori Kawasaki · Rating 4 out of 5]

this report is for Mat's class.

Title: Kinoski ni te written by Naoya Shiga
Publisher: IBC Pub
Time to read: 70 min

seven words summary: care, death, live, bee, mouth, newt, accidental

Discussion Question 1 : Have you ever read Naoya Shiga's works?
my answer: Yes!! I love his works. His works include some Christian constituents, so even foreigners can read easily.

Discussion Question 2 : Do you think death and live are two sides of the same coin?
my answer: Yes, I think so. Because no one can tell when we die. so we have to live preciously.

[Yukari · Rating 4 out of 5]

The description of landscape is beautiful.