Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, three dream-like tales of memory and war: part of our Japanese novella series, showcasing the best contemporary Japanese writing A Japanese man, far from home, travels the countryside of Normandy with a friend - talking about war, literature, and everything in between. As his ideas of his life become more entangled with his personal writing, the pangs of his past and his half-forgotten memories overlap and threaten his peace. Owing a debt to French writers from La Fontaine to Proust, the three fable-like tales in The Bear and the Paving Stone are stories of loss, memory and a longing to belong.