The Moon Over the Mountain

Li Zheng, a poet of brilliant talent, abandons his post as a government official to devote himself to verse, but fame eludes him. Forced by poverty to return to the bureaucracy, he loses his mind and vanishes into the night. The following year, his old friend Yuan Can encounters a tiger on a road through the mountains - a beast that speaks in Li Zheng's voice and begins to confess how he came to be transformed.

From the title story "The Moon Over the Mountain" to "Happiness," where dream and reality trade places on a Palauan island; "Husband and Wife," the tale of a man struggling to escape his jealous wife's tyranny; "The Master Archer," a fable of skill pursued to its uttermost limit; "The Curse of Letters," portraying an Assyrian scholar enthralled by the uncanny power of written characters; the epic "Li Ling," which follows the fates of three men at the mercy of a Han dynasty emperor; and "The Disciple," the life of Zi Lu, Confucius's most unruly follower.

From ancient China to Assyria to the islands of the South Seas - these eight tales, spanning ages and continents, illuminate the beast that dwells within us, the heights and losses of mastery, and souls caught between conviction and compromise. None of them offers an easy answer.

Nakajima Atsushi (1909-1942) published these stories in the final year of his short life. "The Moon Over the Mountain" is a staple of Japanese high-school literature curricula and has been read for over eighty years as a classic of modern Japanese literature.