The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji Miyazawa, translated by John Bester. NYRB Classics, 2018, $15.95 paper.

THE TALES of Kenji Miyazawa teem with fantastic figures—an aggrieved rat-trap, upset that its human owners cringe when they have to touch it; a mysterious “air beast,” large, flattish, and white, that clings to its display stand at a village festival, shrinking and swelling as a showman pokes at it with his stick; a cat who approaches the town cellist and, bearing as payment a ripe tomato, asks him politely to play Schumann’s Träumerei.

Your standard capsule biography of Miyazawa tends to form itself around his eccentricities, attempting to pinpoint the source of his colorful fantasies. An aesthete born to a wealthy family in Japan’s Iwate Prefecture, Miyazawa spent his youth writing nature poetry. In 1918 he graduated from Morioka Agriculture and Forestry College and committed himself to vegetarianism. He spent the early 1920s living in Tokyo, preaching the doctrine of Nichiren Buddhism by day and sleeping in the streets at night. After this spell of heart-whole bohemianism, he returned home and took up teaching at an agricultural high school. An avid hiker and nature-admirer, he frequently took his students for long walks in the countryside, rambling over and through hills and fields and woods.

A certain dreaminess seems to have tinged all of Miyazawa’s endeavors, including his