On "The Glass Blower's Bones" by Fei Wu (2450 words) ***

Years ago I assigned a Yukio Mishima story to a introduction to literature class I was teaching. They were not impressed. The tale "made no sense." Our western minds want to read things linearly; but tales from the East are often cyclical or, well, simply strange. Fei Wu's tale is about people living in a city of glass, one that eventually shatters. It's also about the glassmaker himself, how he keeps a woman under glass as his own. Despite its strangeness, one gets the sense that this is a tale about a man whose treatment of his wife eventually catches up to him--yep, it's a relatively ordinary world underneath. But thing is, when viewed from generations later, the glassblower--indeed, the one-time city--is the stuff of legend. Legends die hard. Read the tale here at Far Enough East.