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MIYAZAWA KENJI remains not only Japan's most popular and beloved writer of stories for children and adults but a prescient voice for this century on how we can survive and prevail over the most challenging conditions that we face on this planet. Roger Pulvers writes in his Introduction ..."Kenji's message is: It is easy to exclude others who are 'different' from your circle, but if you exclude others, you exclude yourself, because you are inextricably linked to them; it is easy to be unkind to others, but if you are unkind to others, you are unkind to yourself; it is very easy to kill, but if you kill another person, the person who dies within is yourself.""Destroy nature in any or all of its qualities and we destroy human goodness, compassion and love. No Japanese understood this more profoundly than Miyazawa Kenji, and the people of the world need to know that."In this new collection, acclaimed author, translator and film director Roger Pulvers presents, in masterful translations, some of Miyazawa Kenji's most well-known stories. In "The Boy of the Winds" the wind arrives in a village in the form of a boy, Matasaburo, bringing, with great compassion, a warning over the abuse of nature by humans. In "The Bears on Mt. Nametoko," the fate of the king of the mountains, Kojuro, becomes that of the bears he hunts. And in the exquisitely poignant "Barefeet of Light" two young brothers face the cruelest hardships ... and the message Kenji gives us is always one of devotion and love.In addition, there are stories here by other well-known Japanese authors, the final one being the beautiful tribute to the importance of water in our lives, Inoue Hisashi's "The Water Letters."All translations come with commentary that puts the works in their historical and social context.The Japan Times has written of an earlier anthology of his works translated by Roger Pulvers: "The reader can clearly feel Miyazawa's values and hopes for humanity across time...."

ROGER PULVERS'S ACCLAIMED TRANSLATION of Night on the Milky Way Train, previously available only in a bilingual edition in Japan, is here now for readers of all ages around the world to enjoy.Night on the Milky Way Train occupies the place in the literature of Japan that Alice in Wonderland does in the English-speaking world. This amazing story of two boys - Kenji named them Giovanni and Campanella - who find themselves on a miraculous train running through the heavens, has entranced Japanese readers for many years. What happens to the boys is a tale of both immense sorrow and equally immense hope.In addition, Pulvers offers nine other translations, all of them appearing in print outside Japan for the first time. The comical character Gauche, whose cello playing soothes the animals at his humble little cottage. The two hunters who find the tables literally turned on them as they are about to be served up to the animals they have been hunting. The pig at the Frandon Agricultural School who refuses to die. The nighthawk who, rejected by the other birds, chooses immortality in the form of a star … and more.Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) has been compared to Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. But his profound compassion, stemming from his Buddhist faith and his scientific background, makes him that unique combination of East and West that symbolises Japan's great gifts to the world. A dedicated vegetarian (a rarity even in today's Japan) and a staunch believer in animal rights mark him as a pioneer of his time and a writer who speaks directly to the greatest concerns of the twenty-first century.