Miyazawa Kenji’s Fur of the Glacier Mouse was published in Iwate Daily Newspaper in 1923, one year before the collection of short nine stories, The Restaurant of Many Orders. It was at times critiqued as inconsistent (Tatsuo Tsudukihashi) and considered a fable of the friction between Japan and Russia (Takahisa Kisa) culminating with the Nikolayevsk incident (1920). Although the story may have had the function to reactivate recent historical events in the memory of the readers of the time, nowhere in the text is a connection with Russia being suggested. Moreover, despite the vague description of the characters and the numerous puzzling aspects of the story, it is solidly based upon a city dweller-hunter-wilderness triadic relationship, also present in the story The Restaurant of Many Orders and which makes the backbone of The Bears of Mt. Nametoko written in 1927.

While the main focus of the presentation will be to explain the concern with environmental balance expressed through this relationship, ultimately I will also indicate other sensitive environmental topics such as dwelling, ecoterorism or animal rights, which are interwoven in the text. I hope thus to achieve a double purpose: to shed light upon those parts of the narrative which have been so far considered inconsistent or incomprehensible and to reposition the work as one that compiles many of the motifs identified in Miyazawa’s latter writings, despite being rather critically neglected.