The prose is eerily quiet, yet it grips you with its incredible depictions of the details of our lives. If you're looking for a book to settle down with for an evening, to savor, to luxuriate in, this is it. It's been criminally overlooked by most media, and you'll be lucky to find it in the bookstores, but Still Life is a literary treasure, one that deserves your attention. Evening Clouds T HE 13 stories in this collection by Japanese writer Junzo Shono are linked by the daily life of a husband and wife and their children. The stories are like the back of a tapestry where threads seem to cross randomly.
Readers understand crucial events through ordinary days.
But these quiet tales have a cumulative power. Toys, birds, and playing cards relate to human lives as portents, parallels, parodies. The mother, with her secret sorrows, and the puzzled, bemused father savor reveries and survive unexplained misfortunes. Shono's vivid snapshot technique, the layering of images, events, and conversations, creates an effect Western readers may find more akin to an Ozu film crossed with haiku than to traditional short stories. Shono is one of the leading writers of postwar Japan, a master of simplicity and subtlety.