[In the following foreward to his translation of Miyazawa's children's tales entitled Wings from Afar, Bester summarizes the "charm and inventiveness, " humanism, and "intense nostalgia for innocence" that characterize Miyazawa's short stories.]

Of the sixteen tales translated [in Winds from Afar] six have appeared previously in a small volume entitled Winds and Wildcat Places. The previous collection was produced essentially as a book for children. In increasing the number of stories and publishing them in the present format, the aim has been not only to create a definitive edition of the best of Miyazawa but also to produce a book that can be enjoyed at least as much by adults as by children.

To do this implies a considerable confidence in the value of Miyazawa's children's stories. To translate works such as these forty years after their author's death and from a language as remote as Japanese suggests that they have acquired a kind of classic status.

Such a status has in fact long since been achieved in Miyazawa's own country. His place in modern Japanese literature is secure. Learned papers are published on him, and new editions continue to appear. His work does not seem to date, for it is read now by a generation quite different from Miyazawa's.

One obvious reason for this is that although his writing is very much a product of the northern country district of Honshu where he lived his short life, his appeal relies basically on qualities unrelated to any particular society or country. The same is true, of course, of most classic children's stories, and in this sense Miyazawa's work easily avoids the barriers that inevitably blunt our response to much in Japanese literature. More important here, though, is the question of what, in the positive sense, Miyazawa offers the adult reader in other countries.

The most obvious elements in Miyazawa's appeal are the charm and inventiveness of his tales. They are all good stories. They have the humor and inconsequentiality, the ability to evoke a world of their own, the absence of theorizing, and the satisfying sense of inevitability that everyone expects of children's stories. With engaging freedom, the choice of characters ranges from wildcats to elderly generals to dustpans. And as most good children's stories do, they comment ruefully on moral questions and the realities that precede and underlie the adult world.

But it is in the way Miyazawa's work, consciously and unconsciously, reflects that world that his special qualities begin to assert themselves. The realm that his characters inhabit is not a cozy middle-class world, but neither do his shapes and shadows harbor barely concealed Freudian horrors. His settings are northern without nordic morbidity. He avoids insipidity without falling into the grotesque. In his cautionary tales he disposes of his villains with satisfying heartlessness, but there is little sadism. Without sentimentality, his world achieves a peculiar sweetness and light.

That Miyazawa was aware of the everyday foibles and stupidities of humanity is clear, of course, from the element of fable in his work. The three episodes of "The Spider, the Slug, and the Raccoon," though humorous, have an unusually sharp element of satire. That he also knew enough of human relationships to have developed a remarkable compassion for their well-meaning blunderings is clear from that moving little tragi-comedy, "Earthgod and the Fox."

Yet still more essential in Miyazawa than this humanism is an intense nostalgia for innocence, for the childlike state that precedes all such things as society and morality. This nostalgia, together with the sensitivity towards nature with which it is so closely linked is, above all, what gives his work its special flavor. The harking back to innocence is not so much a retreat into childhood as a reaffirmation of certain aspects of our relationship with the universe about us. When, as in "The Kenju Wood," this theme of innocence is fairly explicit, it can come close to sentimentality (even though this particular story has a special poignancy in today's polluted world). In other tales, however, it is treated more subtly, while in some—especially in that small masterpiece of economy, "A Stem of Lilies"—it acquires a peculiarly radiant, almost religious intensity.

And here we come close to the heart of Miyazawa's appeal. A similar quickening of the poetic imagination, triggered in most cases by the author's response to nature, occurs sporadically throughout the whole of his work. Basically, it is the strength of his feeling for nature that makes him unique. For Miyazawa, nature is all movement and color. His word-painting, simple though it is, has a freshness of palette, a sense of rediscovery, and an almost unnatural sensitivity that calls to mind some Impressionist pictures. With all this goes a sense of immense space—of distant hills, winds from afar, and infinite depths to the heavens. Not only is his work free of coziness and claustrophobia: he seems positively to go out to meet the loneliness of the universe.

Time and again, this awareness of nature transmutes something quite ordinary into poetry. "The Dahlias and the Crane" would be no more than a charming cautionary tale if it were not also a miniature prose-poem showing the year slipping inexorably from late summer into autumn. "The Fire Stone" might be a routine morality without its recurring images of nature. "Wildcat and the Acorns," superficially one of the more "childlike" of the stories, has a morning freshness that complements the character of the boy Ichiro. And the whole of "The Red Blanket" is a kind of set-piece that magically evokes the passage of a snowstorm from the first uneasy stirrings in the sky, through the height of the blizzard, to the serenity of the sun's return.

Yet this is not quite all. Here and there, in these stories, one is struck by a strength of feeling that borders on ecstasy. It is as though Miyazawa's nostalgia for innocence was accompanied by a longing for complete absorption into the universe, a longing whose intensity is heightened to the point where the only outlet it can find is in ritual. Nowhere is this more clear than at the end of "The First Deer Dance," where the sense of quivering joy goes far beyond what one would expect in a tale that, superficially, is no more than an imaginative reconstruction of the origins of a folk dance. In "The Nighthawk Star," the return to nature finds a different (perhaps slightly more facile) form when the unhappy nighthawk attains release in an almost Christian style apotheosis. In "The Bears of Mt. Nametoko," the hunter forced by circumstances into the destruction of other creatures is finally reconciled with his victims and reabsorbed into the universe in a scene of brooding grandeur that has the mystery of some primeval rite.

But once this element is perceived, it is found recurring, in less obvious ways, again and again throughout the stories. A sunset becomes a ceremony; the bellflower tolls the indifference of nature to its creatures; the seasons parade past, and man gazes in awe at the solemn procession of the stars. Miyazawa takes us back, not to the nursery but to somewhere freer, more timeless, and more indifferent to ourselves. From time to time, in these seemingly slight, utterly charming tales, he reaches out towards the essence of wonder and the heart of poetry. It is those moments that give them their substance and set the seal on their value for anyone, in any country, who will respond.