A look at one of the strange tales by Miyazawa

It's hard to grasp or to give a sense of how odd the stories are in Kwnji Miyazawa's Once and Forever (NYRB 2018, based on 1993 translations - stories written in the 1920s/30s and most of them unpublished in KM's lifetime); many involve the supernatural, most involve communications between humans and animals, none is realistic in any conventional sense. As noted yesterday, many seem to begin as children's stories, involving for example talking birds or bears, but almost all lead to a brutal or gruesome ending, unsuitable for young children to say the least. One example, and one of the more accessible stories in the collection, is the Restaurant of Many Orders, in which two young men are hiking in the mountains, on a hunting expedition, and they get separated from their mountain guide and soon lost - but then surprisingly they come upon a restaurant with the eponymous name. They enter and walk through many corridors to enter the restaurant proper, and each corridor contains a placard with instructions, such as take off your boots and jacket, leave your guns here, etc. - and toward the end, as the men become puzzled, the commands are to rub some cream on all their exposed skin and the next one is to sprinkle yourself with salt and pepper - at which point the two men recognize that they are being prepared as the "order" of the day - so they take off. They find their guide, who leads them back home, where they try to wash off the salt, pepper, and cream (a better translation might be "butter") and forever after their skin is wrinkled. What do we make of this story? In a way, it's the journey of a lifetime; in another way, it's payback for the brutality of hunting for sport; and in another way perhaps it's just creepy and nightmarish tale, intended to upset and disturb. A few of the stories are less horrific, including one in which a local monarch prepares for the visit of the Buddha and in which a child provides the gift that the Buddha would most desire, a spray of flowering lilies - despite the oddness of the king's retainer arguing with the child over the price he's willing to pay for the flowers, this story is probably the least unsettling of the collection. Not all succeed - notably one that ends with the sophomoric trope "it was all a dream" - but most of these tales are captivating in their oddity.