I never used to like short stories. I didn’t find them satisfying…Just when I was adjusting the world of the story, it was over. But in Japan, I slowly fell in love with shorter forms. From haiku to palm-of-the hand stories, I began to really embrace the constraints of shorter forms.
In art, constraints become aesthetic elements of craft to be appreciated. It is in some ways, these craft elements are can be more interesting than the story itself.
Traditional Japanese poetry, for example, must have a seasonal term. It can make use of evocative place names and tropes. Short stories have a pivot. This is different from conflict and resolution… oh, how different it can be! See my essay in the Millions: Culture Shock.
My favorite short story (novella?) of all time is Tanizaki’s Captain Shigemoto’s Mother. If you haven’t read it yet—please don’t miss it!
If you have a favorite short story, please tell me!
A few years ago, I watched Joyce Carol Oates’ master class on the craft of writing short stories on masterclass.com and loved it! After watching it, I wrote my first ever short story, Bare Bones. It went on to receive the 2020 Calvino Prize—judged by Joyce Carol Oates.
Here are some recent collections that floored have me:
Daniel Mason’s A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth: Stories
Karen Russell’s Orange World
Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are (Trans Polly Barton)
Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage
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Writing class darling (a perfect frame story?): Weike Wang’s Omakase
Wow! Bare Bones was your first short story? I'm speechless. Otherwise, I'm so interested in your experience of shifting into enjoying short written forms once you were in Japan. I may be stretching a point to say this, but I have always thought that some forms of writing are as embedded in the rhythms of everyday life as color is the play of light. If this is so, I'm not surprised that with your sensitivity to your surroundings, and with the culture as a whole created by boundaries of sensitivity to nature, I'm not surprised that short forms would emerge to be identities whose tangible presence finds you. A "win-win" as they say!
Not a writer myself but....
When I was studying Chinese, it must have been about 20 years ago, a private tutor set me an essay topic about "snow". Well, I wrote a short piece about depressing weather conditions (I can't really remember what I wrote), and right at the end of the story I wrote that it snowed. The point was that snow was a welcome relief from what went before.
I was told I hadn't written on the topic and I should have looked in one of those books that give you all kinds of Chinese idioms and expressions describing snow.
Not quite the same as writing a short story -- the point was to improve my Chinese -- but I was quite taken aback by the requirement to write a piece about "snow", just "snow".