The strange tales of the neglected writer Kenji Miyazawa

Another classic from the great NYRB publishing house brings out from obscurity (to most Western readers, anyway) the work of Kenji Miyazwa, a Japanese writer who died in his 30s and whose work - from roughly 1920-1932 - was for the most part unpublished in his lifetime. The NYRB collection - called Once and Forever - from a 1993 translation by [will look up name] John Bester - brings together about 20 short stories, or tales if you will, and has strangely by my local library been classified as Fantasy. Well, these stories are not in the tradition of realism, by any means, but I don't think we'd call Borges or Kafka writers of " fantasy." Each of the stories, at least through the first 1/3 of the collection, involves communication w/ animals and sometimes w/ spirits, and honestly this type of writing rarely appeals to me - but Miyazawa brings much more to us. First of all, his writing is vivid and sharply depicts the strange landscapes, often forests, in which his tales unfold. They're generally, maybe always, about human interaction with the animals: a hunter confronts a bear in the forest, a man accidentally leaves a sweat rag on the forest floor and returns to the site to find a circle of deer pondering this to them strange relic, a man entices an elephant to perform tasks for him and gradually diminishes the amount of feed he is giving the elephant until the elephant rebels. These short descriptions, though, miss the essence of Miyazawa's work, which always has a creep and threatening tone. As I read each story I tried to picture how the stories might be illustrated, which is not difficult as the writing is quite pictorial (and the brief intro in this edition notes that some of his work has been adapted to anime) - but each time I though the story might make a great illustrated children's book I was brought up short by the conclusion to the stories, often involving gruesome death and despair, so, no, these are not stories for children but they might translate well for adolescents. Overall, to this point, I do not see an overall theme to these collected tales other than that there are perhaps many points of intersection between human and animal life yet to explore these intersections, to cross the boundary and expect animals to behave in a human-like manner will inevitably lead to tragedy or catastrophe. As Wittgenstein famously put it: If lions could speak, we wouldn't understand them.