Night on the Galactic Railroad

“The book brims with wonder … Infused with movement and warmth … Reading it you can feel the breadth of what is possible in existence.” —Betsy Bird, School Library Journal’s A Fuse 8 Blog“They are all good stories, with a proper beginning, middle, and end, as all good stories should have, and you can enjoy them as much now as you ever will. But under the surface they don’t really belong to any particular country. However long we live, the grass will always grow at our feet and the stars hang over our heads, and standing between them we shall sometimes feel rather frightened. Miyazawa, too, know how it was to be frightened by the world about him, but he managed to love it at the same time, and to love his fellow-creatures as well.” —John Bester“One of the distinctive features of Kenji’s poetical imagination is his fondness for sparkling, limpid, translucent images: a longing for the stars in the night sky, a patch of blue sky glimpsed between clouds, crystal-clear waters that sparkle as they flow gaily downstream.” —Kenji-World.net“Miyazawa moves you to sorrow, to laugh, chuckle, marvel—he makes you live the things he describes.”—Hiroaki Sato“For Miyazawa, what will happen in the future is inextricably part of what is happening now, and what happened in the past. It is all part of ‘the monstrous bright accumulation of time.’ He, living or dead, or you, or me, or anyone else, experiences this fusion of time, congealed into the present moment from which we look forward and back. To be conscious of all time at once is to be enlightened.” —Roger Pulvers“Kenji Miyazawa fables are international-class.” —David Mitchell

Kenji Miyazawa was a poet and farmer born in Iwate Prefecture. He studied geology at Morioka Imperial College of Agriculture and Forestry, moved to Tokyo, and began writing poetry, short stories, and children’s books. He self-published his first book, a work for children, in 1924. Three of his books from the 1930s-Night on the Galactic Railroad, Matasaburo of the Wind, and Be not Defeated by the Rain-were published posthumously. Miyazawa’s fiction, poetry, and children’s stories sketch an ecological vision well ahead of its time. Drawing on his training as a scientist and a practitioner of Buddhism, Miyazawa developed a vision of interdependence among all forms of life at all times. His poetry and fiction for children and teens are popular in Japan today.

Osamu Tsukasa was born in Maebashi, Japan in 1936. In 1964, he was a founding member of the Society for Independent Artists. His picture books include The Goose Child, Amenimomakezu, Machinto, The Old Woman’s Tale, and A Million Doves. Tsukasa has written several books of fiction, including On Shadows and The Bronze Mediterranean, as well as books on art and literature, such as The Magic of Books, The Magic of Picture Books, and War and Art. Tsukasa’s work has been shown in exhibitions including “The World of Osamu Tsukasa” at the Ikeda Museum of 20th Century Art and “Inside the Art of Osamu Tsukasa” at the Museum of Modern Art in Gunma. He has been awarded the Shogakukan Prize for Visual Arts, the Yasunari Kawabata Literary Prize, the Mainichi Prize for the Arts, and the Jiro Osaragi Prize.

David Boyd is an Associate Professor of Japanese. He has translated fiction by Izumi Suzuki, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, and Kanoko Okamoto, among others. His translations of novellas by Hideo Furukawa and Hiroko Oyamada have won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

Asa Yoneda was born in Osaka and studied language, literature, and translation at Oxford University and SOAS University of London. She now lives in Bristol, U.K. In addition to Yukiko Motoya, she has translated works by Banana Yoshimoto, Aoko Matsuda, and Natsuko Kuroda.

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