The 13 stories in this collection by Japanese writer Junzo Shono are linked by the daily life of a husband and wife and their children. The stories are like the back of a tapestry where threads seem to cross randomly. Births, weddings, school activities, a suicide attempt - all occur out of view. Readers understand crucial events through ordinary days. But these quiet tales have a cumulative power. Toys, birds, and playing cards relate to human lives as portents, parallels, parodies. The mother, with her secret sorrows, and the puzzled, bemused father savor reveries and survive unexplained misfortunes. Shono's vivid snapshot technique, the layering of images, events, and conversations, creates an effect Western readers may find more akin to an Ozu film crossed with haiku than to traditional short stories.

Still Life & Other Stories consists of five short stories that vary widely in perspective, structure, setting, and theme. Three stories are written in close third, whereas "Many Worlds" and "The Lover" are written in the first person. Protagonists are male and female, teen-aged and adult. They range in age from 14, as with Zane in "Many Worlds," to 38 year-old Earl of "Mint Condition." The title story features an innovative structure that combines past and future in sections that are demarcated by changes in address, each address representing a formative experience in the life of the protagonist. "Islands" and "Mint Condition" are inspired by the devastating effects of the post-industrial American landscape on the people of rural, working-class areas whose livelihoods have depended on now vanishing industries. These settings are stark and homogenous, and the protagonists of both stories are eventually led to question the assumptions about gender and culture inherent to their communities. In fact, one of the collection's major thematic concerns is the nature of identity and the ways in which it is a social construct. The collection also interrogates the ways in which individuals experience the passage of time. Both teenagers and adults have to grow up fast, to adapt their hopes to the changing times and to the limits of earthly possibility.

Office clerks try to escape the reality of their tedious lives through the ancient art of archery. Two strangers trade fantasies under a fig tree in the center of the Universe. A prostitute is offered a small fortune to reveal her naked soul. Still life with fish is a book about people and their struggle to understand a world that is, at once, logical and absurd a fascinating journey charged with wisdom and imagination, tragedy and humor. Collectively, these stories form an inspiring mural of the human condition.

A young man confronts the horror which inhabits a Tuscan farmhouse; an obsessively ambitious pianist grapples with his nemesis; an urban cyclist wreaks a bizarre revenge; an Italian au pair receives a celestial visitation. In these darkly thoughtful stories by D D Robson, revenge and disappointment, melancholy and hubris sit side by side.