Why Miyazawa's tales are literary fiction

At some point the Kenji Miyazawa "tales" blend into one anoher, and this may be because we are not meant to read straight through a collection (Once and Forever, NYRB publisher) as I'm doing; rather, we should maybe take them one at a time over a period of weeks. That said, there's a similarity of tone and ethos across the collection, as you might expect. Two I read last night give a sense of that: one in which a rat is "ungrateful" and asks for, or demands, "reparations" from other animals every time something goes wrong; the rat ends up in a trap, and there's a creepy sense at the end that the person who trapped the rat will keep him enslaved (not as a pet - maybe something worse). In another story, a young rabbit saves a bird from drowning and the birds reward him w/ a valuable "fire stone"; the rabbit becomes ridiculously cocky now that he has the stone and begins ordering other animals around - he's the "general" and he appoints them all to subsidiary military ranks. Graduallly, the stone loses its luster and at the end the young rabbit's eyes have turned stone-like and he's blind. You can see how these stories, miniature moral or ethical lessons (be nice!), are frightening, even ghastly, and not suitable for young children. Which brings up the question: What is Miyazawa's intended readership? The tales may seem a little too simplistic to be recognized as literary fiction (the library copy I have has been labeled "fantasy"), but they're too weird and unsettling for children's literature (and I know that not all children's literature is sunny and optimistic, but these stories are usually ghastly). This lack of clear genre context may in part explain why it took nearly a century for English translations and why Miyazawa is seldom mentioned among the great Japanese writers of the 20th century. To the extent that one of the goals of literature is to "make it new" and to give readers access to the "consciousness of another," these tales should be high on the list - and it's definitely worth anyone's time to read some, if not all, of the stories in this collection.