The distinguished Japanese author and essayist Junzo Shono was best known for his short stories of family life. His style was typified by understatement and a concern with the mundane details of experience.
Born in Osaka, the fourth of seven children, Shono studied English at Osaka Foreign Language School from 1939 to 1941. He read Charles Lamb and Katherine Mansfield, who, with Japanese authors such as Masuji Ibuse and Hyakken Uchida, would prove lasting influences on his work. He studied Asian history at Kyushu Imperial University in 1942-43, before being drafted into the Japanese Navy. He wrote his first published story, Snow/Fireflies (1944), just before his war service.
After the war, while working initially as a teacher, and later for the Asahi Broadcasting Company, Shono wrote short stories for literary journals. The story Caresses (1949) gained critical favour, but his breakthrough was the collection Evenings at the Poolside (1955), the title story of which depicted a married couple experiencing difficulties after the husband is sacked for embezzlement. The collection won the Akutagawa Prize, which enabled him to become a full-time writer.
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In 1956 Shono published the novel-length Pomelo Flower, which established his preferred mode of “family chronicle”. In 1957 he took up a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. The year in the US inspired stories and essays, from Sojourn in Gambier (1959) to Ohio Reminiscence (1991).
Back in Japan he wrote Still Life (1960), a story of 18 episodes in the life of a family based on Shono’s own. It won the Shinchosha Prize for Literature, and thereafter, Shono repeatedly focused on the same family (albeit using different names), drawing on details of his own experience. He was convinced that “the really worthwhile things speak to us in small voices”, and his understated observation earned comparisons with haiku poetry and the film dramas of Yasujiro Ozu.
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Another acclaimed work in this vein was Evening Clouds (1965), which won the Yomiuri Literary Prize; it followed a Tokyo family after their move to the countryside. The family works continued with Picture Cards (1970) and the children’s book Akio and Ryoji (1972). In his later years, in Pencil-Pattern Sweatshirt (1992) and Cherry Jam (1994), Shono focused on the now elderly parents and their relationship with their granddaughter.
Shono produced works recording the “oral histories of ordinary people”. He wrote numerous essays. He taught English at Waseda University, Tokyo. In 1973 his collected works were published by Kodansha. He received the Kawasaki City Cultural Prize and the Japan Art Academy Award. He became a member of the Japan Art Academy in 1978 and was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1993. His works were translated into English and other languages.
His wife Chizuko, whom he married in 1946, survives him. Their daughter and two sons were the models for the children in Shono’s fictional family.
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Junzo Sono, writer, was born on February 9, 1921. He died on September 21, 2009, aged 88