Claus Stamm 11 min read

Lonely widower Goro, sighing over his own terrible cooking and missing his dead wife's, wishes aloud for a jolly, round new wife, a wish a passing monster is only too glad to grant.

Claus Stamm's 1960 story is a charming fantasy and first-contact tale in the Japanese folktale mode. Warm, funny, delightful. Read it for a genial fable spun from Japanese folklore, where a widower's wish for a wife brings unexpected, and shape-shifting, company, in a witty, good-humored golden-age piece with the flavor of an old country tale.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

11 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).