SOURCE: A review of The Paper Door and Other Stories, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 1, Winter, 1989, p. 166.

In the review below, Miller admires the "truthfulness" of the pieces in this collection of Shiga's stories.

Shiga, a member of the White Birch Movement (Shirakabaha), which was the most articulate group of writers advocating realism in fiction, absorbed the tenets of Western realism and married it to traditional Japanese esthetics and subjects. Like Natsume Sōseki, Shiga was interested in the subtleties of human psychology and human relationships. His realism never degenerated into the excesses of the watakushi-shōsetsu or I-novel, because he was always aware of his craft, his own subjectivity, his own imagination, and their influence on the writing and the story it created. In Shiga's work, as aptly demonstrated in story after story in The Paper Door, there is a strong tension between the truth of...