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A university professor receives a bereaved mother whose composed manner appears to embody the ideal he has made of Japanese restraint.
A Buddhist priest’s determined campaign to shorten his extraordinary nose brings him the attention he thought he wanted, and also a new humiliation.
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.
Cornered by the club bore, a quiet reader discovers that the best defense may be a better, bigger story.
A shy hotel guest helps a titled stranger recover her lost identity, one expensive social test at a time.
A political hopeful congratulates himself on exposing a train-carriage swindler—until two small details unsettle his triumph.
A Christmas house party asks guests to stay in character, and two players pursue realism far beyond the hostess's expectations.
A fashionable aunt adopts a charming young man of uncertain background and learns how quickly luxury can educate him.
A respectable widow follows an old admirer into the wilderness, where love, comfort, and civilization prove incompatible.
A cynical park-goer tests a stranger's hard-luck story against one missing bar of soap.
A cash-strapped host’s communal house party thrives because one guest is universally detested—and may be more useful than she seems.
A penniless gambler stakes more than he can pay on a “sure” billiards match and searches for any way to stop the score.
A struggling artist rescues a financier’s disastrous breakfast food with one brilliantly grim advertisement.
Bored by rural life and his wife’s endless translation, a rector invents a Persian poet whose fame can safely last until the war ends.
A sheltered woman enters political society armed only with novels and local newspapers, and finds villains everywhere she looks.
A strange boy living in the woods enters a country household just as old disappearances begin to look newly ominous.
A sailor-suited child becomes the charming face of a close election, until his fierce idea of party loyalty takes control of the poll.
A former cavalryman trudges Dorset lanes with household parcels, making an observer question what a diminished life can still contain.
A wife’s devotion to an untouchable lapdog governs every family plan, until her husband and sister devise a final remedy.
Two poor children invent a criminal life for a sinister shopwindow doll, then watch a rich boy carry her toward an unexpected fate.
Determined to eclipse a rival, Mrs. Packletide purchases a risk-free tiger hunt—and an audience with a very sharp memory.
Two market shoppers display the benefits of cheap high culture by turning every grievance into history, criticism, and misquotation.
A struggling grocer turns mysterious purchases, foreign coins, and a hunted-looking boy into the best attraction in the suburb.
At a respectable garden party, Reginald turns small talk into social demolition while his companion scrambles to contain him.
