The story shelf

Follow your curiosity.

A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.

5 stories · Selected from the catalog

A moonlit song outside a village house becomes the first chapter in a legend about Japan’s shape-shifting badgers.

From Paradise, the Buddha offers a single spider’s thread to a robber suffering at the bottom of Hell.

5 min · Wondrous

A Chinese landowner who can drink without ever growing drunk submits to an eccentric monk’s treatment for the creature said to live inside him.

14 min · Dreamlike

When a devil disguised as a missionary plants a mysterious crop in sixteenth-century Japan, one cattle dealer makes a wager to learn its name.

13 min · Playful

Impoverished in Tang-dynasty Loyang, Tu Tzuchun is offered a second fortune by an enigmatic old man—but begins to want something different.

21 min · Wondrous

5 stories