Author Guide · 2026-05-04 · Reading time ~ 8 min
Kajii Motojirō — Four Stories Around the Lemon
Dead at 31, Kajii left behind the most quietly explosive prose of late-Taishō Japan. Four pieces in Korean on Pagera trace the nerves of a city in season.
Pagera Editorial
Kajii Motojirō (1901–1932) died at thirty-one, leaving fewer than twenty short pieces of fiction. Within them he packed the nerves of a city, the weight of each season, and the exact texture of desire pressing against exhaustion. In Korea he is known mainly for "Lemon." But four pieces are now available in Korean on Pagera, and read together they sketch a fuller picture: the most quietly explosive short prose of late-Taishō Japan.
Why Kajii, and Why Now
During Japan's literary boom in Korea — roughly the 1990s and early 2000s — "Lemon" sold in numbers unusual for a story under three thousand words. A narrator with a nervous condition wanders into a Maruzen bookshop, stacks art books on the table, balances a cold yellow lemon on top, and walks out imagining the whole pile exploding. It is a scene of small, secret defiance against city fatigue. The image has stayed with Korean readers ever since.
Yet stopping at "Lemon" leaves most of Kajii unread. He is a writer of sensation at the level of individual nerves — urban but intensely private, plotless but surprisingly dense. All four pieces now in Korean make it possible for the first time to read him in breadth rather than in a single famous excerpt.
Three Works to Start With
Lemon (檸檬)
The narrator's nervous condition has made him unable to enjoy the bookshops and cafés he once loved. On a whim he buys a single lemon from a fruit stand — cold, yellow, smelling of citrus oil. The lemon alone lightens something in him. He carries it into Maruzen, balances it on a tower of art books, and slips out, imagining the shop detonating behind him. Compact, strange, and completely itself: this is where Kajii's whole sensibility fits in a single scene.
A Certain Landscape of the Mind (ある心の風景)
A young man looks out at a desolate city street. Worn buildings, a lane that goes nowhere, people who barely move. The description of the scene folds gradually into the narrator's interior, so that by the end it is unclear whether he is describing the city or his own paralysis. Nothing happens. The loneliness is the denser for it. Of all Kajii's pieces this one comes closest to prose poetry.
Caress (愛撫)
It begins with the odd sensation of stroking a cat's ear. From that domestic starting point Kajii moves quietly toward the concealed cruelty and desire that sit inside ordinary affection. Very short, but the sharpest demonstration of how precisely Kajii can make discomfort register. Read alongside "Lemon" it defines the outer edges of his sensory range.
Recommended Reading Order
First time: "Lemon" — three thousand words that explain why this writer is still read a century later.
After "Lemon": "Caress" to see how he hones sensation, then "A Certain Landscape of the Mind" for the overlap between cityscape and interior.
For depth: "On the Journal Aozora" — a memoir essay in which Kajii writes directly about the coterie magazine that shaped his early work. More discursive than the stories, and all the more revealing for it.
What Reading Kajii Feels Like
Kajii's sentences are short. His scenes are simple. No difficult vocabulary, no elaborate plots. And yet something stays with you after closing the page — the cold weight of a lemon, the strange softness of a cat's ear, the airless stillness of a backstreet in late afternoon. His pieces work harder after you finish than while you are reading.
That a writer who died at thirty-one could leave behind this density is a fact that keeps registering as strange, no matter how many times you return to the work. Four pieces are a good place to find out why.
Read on Pagera
All four pieces are available in Korean on Pagera, with no login or installation required. Browse Kajii Motojirō on Pagera.