When Minakami Tsutomu was six or seven years old, he was walking near his home in rural Fukui Prefecture and happened upon a large fallen tree. Years before, while the tree had been alive, a storm had snapped off its top, and in its horizontal position the boy could now see into its hollow crown, which he found filled with dead and dying animals: snakes, rats, toads, mice, and lizards. A hawk circling above his head indicated that the hollow treetop was serving as a repository for the hawk's prey.

In Minakami's prizewinning Gan no tera (Temple of the Wild Geese, 1961) and in other stories this image of the hollow tree reappears, and in several ways it serves as an appropriate introduction to his fiction. Like many of the images in his writing, the hollow tree comes directly from his experience and thus reflects the strong autobiographical basis...