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    Bliss, and Other Stories
    Bliss, and Other Stories
    Bliss, and Other Stories
    Ebook232 pages3 hours

    Bliss, and Other Stories

    By Katherine Mansfield and Mint Editions

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    When the day of Lord Saito Gonji’s birthday arrives, Gonji celebrates with dread, knowing that in a week, he will be married. Sent away in his youth for samurai training, and then to higher education, Gonji is very connected to his studies. After his intelligence is proven, his professors even tell Gonji that he would do great things for Japan one day. However, since he is the youngest son in his family, Gonji is expected to marry—a social expectation that he cannot get around. Now, on his birthday, he is expected to marry a childhood friend, Ohano in one week, which will greatly interfere with his studies. When his family notice how upset Gonji is over the arranged marriage, they grant him one week of pure freedom, allowing him to do whatever he chooses. Soon into the week, Gonji meets a famous dancer. Known by the stage name of Spider, the dancer was at the height of her career after being trained by the most celebrated geisha in Japan. When Spider and Gonji become intimate during the week, their fleeting encounter soon proves to complicate the plans Gonji’s parents made for him.

    Featuring complex and memorable characters as well as detailed descriptions of Japanese customs and landscapes, The Honorable Miss Moonlight depicts a vivid portrait of 20th century Japan. With themes of gender, sexuality, identity, and a close perspective of the honor/shame culture of Japan in the 1900s, The Honorable Miss Moonlight is as enlightening as it is entertaining.

    First published in 1912, The Honorable Miss Moonlight is one of Onoto Watanna’s most famous works, yet is rarely found in print. This special edition features a stunning cover design and is printed in an easy-to-read font. With these accommodations, this edition caters to contemporary readers by restoring the novel to modern standards while preserving the original intricacy of Onoto Watanna’s work.

    Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

    With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMint Editions
    Release dateFeb 1, 2021
    ISBN9781513276199
    Author

    Katherine Mansfield

    Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born into a wealthy family in Wellington, New Zealand. She received a formal education at Queen’s College in London where she began her literary career. She found regular work with the periodical Rhythm, later known as The Blue Review, before publishing her first book, In a German Pension in 1911. Over the next decade, Mansfield would gain critical acclaim for her masterful short stories, including “Bliss” and “The Garden Party.”

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    Reviews for Bliss, and Other Stories

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Bliss was Mansfield's second short story collection. The most conspicuous story in the book is not "Bliss", but "Prelude", a long piece about a middle-class New Zealand family, obviously modelled on Mansfield's own, moving to a new out-of-town house with a big garden. Apart from being rather longer than most, this has pretty much all the hallmarks of a Mansfield story. We are thrown in at the deep end without any explanation of who is who or what's happening, so that we have to work it out for ourselves from a series of little clues, and will make a few false assumptions before we get it all straight. Nothing obviously important happens, and the story stops as inexplicably as it started, with the lid of a jar falling off a table and not breaking. But in the meantime, we have somehow or other discovered a surprising amount about the members of the family and what is going on in their minds, information that would have made all their lives much easier if they had been able to express it and exchange it with each other. It's a story about things that mostly don't happen, connections that are not made, feelings that can't be shared. (An earlier version of this story was later published posthumously as "The Aloe".) The title story, "Bliss", the one Virginia Woolf threw down with the expression "She's done for!" the first time she read it ("...the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind. She writes badly too."), is perhaps the most direct in the book - Bertha is a young housewife who's feeling inexplicably much happier than is justified by being about to host a dinner-party. She discovers over the tomato soup that she's fallen desperately and completely in love - without realising it - with one of her guests. They share a perfect moment together over the pear tree, then Mansfield disillusions her horribly, and brings the story to a rapid halt before we've quite decided in which way everything is going to continue badly - for continue badly it must.The remaining stories in the collection all seem to touch on similar themes of people being stuck in situations where they are permanently at cross-purposes, doing some kind of slow, painful harm through their inability to be open and honest about something. Sometimes it's a marriage, sometimes employer and employee, sometimes a group of people trapped in the same social convention. The mood is steered by important little details of setting, speech, weather, plants (Mansfield always brings significant plants in somewhere), but there's always something nasty for us to discover about human nature, and it's usually something that we wouldn't have discovered without Mansfield to lead us to it.
    • 4/5
      Doubtless the precursor to Modernism as we know it, Mansfield effortlessly melds the schizophrenia of the Gothic with the disjointed imagery and stream of consciousness description of Modernism. Mansfield endows her foils with hidden agendas and her narrators with an uncanny paranoia and fear of the unknown. Several of the stories herein feature children, but often presented starkly, as if through the lens of the governess or coquette. A few of the characters espouse lesbian and bi traits while simultaneously neutered and crushed under the cloister-like oppression of reality and the masculine dominated 19th Century repression. These stories are built not on plot or characterization, but instead on mood and the half-remembered feelings about seemingly inconsequential past events.
    • 4/5
      4½ stars - I think I liked these stories even more than The Garden Party and Other Stories. Mansfield's use of color in her descriptions reminds me a bit of Willa Cather although her people are quite different. The title seems ironic since most of the stories described less than perfect relationships...
    • 4/5
      The opening story, about Lottie and Kezia and family, was a good introduction for me because the only Mansfield I'd read previously was "The Doll's House" in high school. She writes wonderfully character-focused stories, whether these are ordinary or extraordinary characters, children or adults, lovely characters or characters with some petty nasty flaw: they're all intensely real.

      "Bliss" itself was wonderful -- the emotion in it, and the constraint around it, and then the ending... And "The Little Governess" who I just want to hug.

      Some I had trouble following -- it didn't help that the NZETC epub tended to repeat chunks of pages and sometimes paragraphed strangely, but there were some stories (especially "The Escape") where the focus moved from one character to another just when I wasn't expecting it to; and then I just couldn't grasp the nub of "The Wind Blows".
    • 3/5
      While I like the style in which these stories are written, each one has a very similar, predictable quality. Because of this I don't know if I have much to say about them, though I would recommend the collection for someone looking for light reading.My favorite story has to be 'Mr. Reginald Peacock's Day,' as I love the way the main character is always saying 'Dear lady, I shall be only too charmed.' This is his standard response to anything his singing-lesson students say, and he's programmed the phrase into his general reflexes, for better or worse.
    • 4/5
      Beautiful written stories in the mode of Chekhov. I'm withholding a star because there was a certain sameness to them. The "good" person is always deceived/disillusioned at the end. In Bliss, the woman's best friend is betraying her with her husband. In the final story, the little governess who is so enamored with the grandfatherly train companion finds herself the object of his lust. The singer, maker of beauty for others, is a bully in his own home. Those that possess grace/virtue are inevitably duped by life. Still, she writes like an angel.

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    Bliss, and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield

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