Three short stories from the early 20th century: Nagai's Behind the Prison, Uno's Closet LLB and Akutagawa’s General Kim (also published in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories).

I found Behind the Prison to be the most thought-provoking because I went down a wikipedia rabbit hole to learn about yellow peril and the Russian-Japanese war. The story itself is hardly a story and more of a description of two environments: the lush and peaceful garden on the narrator's father's estate, and the brutal and pitiful slums just outside its walls. The narrator, an expat who recently returned home, no longer fully identifies with his Japanese culture (reverse culture shock is rough, lemme tell ya!), and is posing his experience of the cultural values of the west (arts, beauty, and individual determination) against the values of his country (technology & education for war's sake, brutality, and classism) using the garden vs the prison slums as a metaphor. I thought it was interesting that, a century on, the American west values the very things that the narrator lamented in his own country.

The other two stories were less compelling to me. Closet LLB is a comedy about a self-aggrandizing loser, and General Kim is a brief account from when Japan invaded Korea in 1523.