Finished reading this short story collection by Yasushi Inoue, and I liked it quite a bit. It’s fairly traditional in style, historically based, and the prose in many of them doesn’t have that overt “this was translated from the Japanese” feel, perhaps because many of the stories don’t take place in Japan. The doorway to the past in these stories is archaeological and historical: each story contains artifacts, or is written from the perspective of the present day, so the gap in time is tangible. The first story, Lou-Lan (楼蘭）, is written in the style of a history, dramatizing the sad history of the tiny city state on the shores of the Lop-Nur, caught between the Hsiang-nu (a powerful nomadic confederation. I think they’re also known as the Huns) and Han dynasty China. Loulan is forced to throw in its lot with one or the other, and suffers greatly in the process; the fluctuations of the desert eventually bury the lush lakeside city in sand, until the present day, when it is rediscovered. The most powerful story, I felt, was the last one, set in 1600s Japan, which tells of the “tradition” of abbots sailing to Fudaraku (a divine isle in the Pure Land), which reads almost like a horror story.