Shōson Nagahara was born in 1901 in the mountains of southwestern Japan. By 1920, he was residing in a boarding house in Los Angeles. His first novel, Lament in the Night, of which this is an excerpt, was published in Japanese in 1925. Nagahara’s next novel, The Tale of Osato, was serialized in the Rafu Shimpo, a regional Japanese daily. Lament in the Night, which contains both works (translated into English for the first time), is out this month from Kaya Press. ANDREW LEONG is a translator and scholar who has taught on film noir and crime fiction, vagabondage, and modern Japanese literature and film. He is is currently working on a book, The City of the Migrant, which recovers the writings of Japanese immigrants who lived and worked in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.