Zero Hour
Ray BradburyAcross peaceful future suburbs, children take up a new game called Invasion—and their parents cannot decide whether to take it seriously.
14 min · Foreboding
The story shelf
Follow your curiosity.
A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Lice
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaOn a crowded war-bound ship in 1864, a plague of lice gives two samurai factions something more urgent to fight about.
9 min · Humorous
Rashōmon
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaIn a ruined Kyoto gate, a hungry servant encounters a stranger whose desperate act forces him to decide what survival permits.
12 min · Eerie
The Badger
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaA moonlit song outside a village house becomes the first chapter in a legend about Japan’s shape-shifting badgers.
5 min · Dreamlike
The Ball
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaAt Tokyo’s dazzling Rokumeikan ball in 1886, a seventeen-year-old Japanese woman dances for the first time with a visiting French naval officer.
11 min · Nostalgic
The Handkerchief
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaA university professor receives a bereaved mother whose composed manner appears to embody the ideal he has made of Japanese restraint.
15 min · Reflective
The Nose
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaA Buddhist priest’s determined campaign to shorten his extraordinary nose brings him the attention he thought he wanted—and a new humiliation.
13 min · Humorous
The Pipe
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaA powerful daimyo’s magnificent gold pipe is the perfect emblem of status—until court attendants discover they can simply ask for one.
14 min · Humorous
The Spider’s Thread
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaFrom Paradise, the Buddha offers a single spider’s thread to a robber suffering at the bottom of Hell.
5 min · Wondrous
The Wine Worm
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaA 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
Tobacco and the Devil
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaWhen 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