Still Life and Other Stories

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Junzo Shono. Still Life and Other Stories

Introduction

A Dance

Evenings at the Pool

Still Life

Crabs

Birds

Woodshed

Azure Sky

Two Men and the Autumn Wind

The Workshop

Picture Cards

The Rooster

The Mouse

On the Roof

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THE ROCK SPRING COLLECTION

Still Life

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A steady breeze blew through the early evening light. The branches of the poplars swayed and rustled without pause, their leaves in rapid motion like the vibrating of a stringed instrument. How she loved to watch the poplars swaying tall in the wind! They seemed to blow the murky gloom in her heart completely away. No, that wasn’t true. They didn’t blow it completely away, but somehow they softened it. As she watched the leaves fluttering in the wind, she had the feeling that they were all speaking some fervent message—though she could not tell what that message might be.

Do thoughts like these come to me because I’m depressed? she wondered. I can’t understand my own behavior anymore. I mean, look at the other night, when I made myself so sick guzzling all that whiskey, one glass after another. Looking back on it now, I can’t think why I would have done such a thing. And I wonder that I didn’t die of alcohol poisoning. No matter how desperately alone I might have felt, how could I have been so reckless and vulgar as to swill down the whole rest of that bottle by the glassful?—especially when I knew it might not be safe. I really can’t understand myself anymore. It frightens me that I could do such a thing.

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