銀河鉄道の夜

About this story

作品について

Night on the Galactic Railroad (Ginga Tetsudō no Yoru) is the best-known work of Kenji Miyazawa, who also wrote The Restaurant of Many Orders. He began it around 1924 and went on rewriting it until he died in 1933, at 37. It was published the following year from the manuscript he left, so the text we have is unfinished: a few passages are missing, and readers still discuss what Kenji meant in places. That has not stopped it from becoming one of the best-loved stories in Japan. It has been made into films, plays and picture books, and it inspired the manga and anime Galaxy Express 999. The boys have Italian names, Giovanni and Campanella, but the town is nowhere in particular. The original runs to about 39,000 characters, in rich and sometimes difficult Japanese. So this is a digest: our own retelling in easy modern Japanese, published in parts, with furigana on every kanji and grammar around JLPT N4 to N3. Part 1 follows the first six chapters, from an afternoon lesson about the Milky Way to the moment Giovanni finds himself on the train.