Atsushi Nakajima, "The Moon Over the Mountain" (Japan)

It’s December 1. Welcome to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries!

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Atsushi Nakajima’s story, “The Moon Over the Mountain”:

Perhaps the best way to begin a collection of advent stories is with a tale of magical transformation. December is a month of changes, and the story of a poet changed into a tiger has something both delightfully astonishing and darkly ominous about it, appropriate for the season. The author, one of the most popular of twentieth-century Japanese writers, came from a family of scholars of ancient China, and many of his tales are set in that almost mythical past. Nakajima died very young, at the age of thirty-three, after publishing a novella on the life of Robert Louis Stevenson with whom he shared a taste for the supernatural.

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What did you think of today's story? Use the hashtag #ssac2021 on Twitter and Instagram to check in with your fellow advent calendarians. And check back tomorrow for commentary on the next story!