The Moon Over the Mountain Stories

The first of the author's fictional works to appear in English, this collection features nine short stories with Ancient China as their subject, drawing inspiration from folk tales, legends, and historical figures. They first appeared in Japanese periodicals in 1942 and 1943 and promised a potentially rich and long career before the author tragically died of pneumonia complicated by severe asthma. The stories have been held in extremely high regard in Japan ever since and are routinely placed alongside of classics such as "Rashomon," by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, andKokoro,by Natsume Soseki.

Atsushi Nakajima was a Japanese writer known for his meticulously researched short stories based on Ancient China. He was the author of Light, Wind and Dreams. Paul McCarthy is a professor of comparative culture at Surugadai University in Hanno, Saitama, Japan, and has a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. He is the translator of numerous books, including A Cat, A Man, and Two Women and Childhood Years by Junichiro Tanizaki. Nobuko Ochner is an associate professor of Japanese at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu. She is the coeditor of Confluences: Studies from East to West in Honor of V.G. Viglielmo. She lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.