Mighty Tales

Good Night Papa:

Short Stories from Japan and Elsewhere

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The Book

Set in Japan, Spain, China, Fiji, Mexico, Indonesia, Costa Rica and Australia, "Good Night Papa: Short Stories from Japan and Elsewhere" is fifteen tales for the time-poor and travel-hungry. Triumphing over adversity is a central theme: a fugitive disguised as a pilgrim discovers his fate rests in the hands of a novice Buddhist monk in Japan (The Pilgrim); a recovering alcoholic mail pilot crashes his plane in the Australian desert with a bottle of gin on board (The Finke River Mail); a snobbish widow must ask the help of local cannery workers to carry a grand piano uphill to her home in Fiji (Baby Grand). These are just some of the tales told.

The Stories

Good Night Papa (the story) was adapted to screenplay and won the Asian Short Screenplay Contest (U.S., 2013). It was judged by Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and produced by JBF Entertainment as a short film in 2014. The Pilgrim, in screenplay form, reached the top eight in the HollyShorts Film Festival (2014) and the semifinals of the Scriptapalooza short screenplay contest in Hollywood, L.A (2016). The Hunting Party was shortlisted for the Big Issue Fiction Edition (Australia, 2015) and Baby Grand made the shortlist of the Overland Victoria University Prize (Australia, 2016). Tuna Steak appears in Flesh: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology which was launched at the London Book Fair (2015), and the final story, a short screenplay called The Foonabiki Barbers, reached the semifinals of the HollyShorts Film Festival in Hollywood, L.A. (2015).

The Storyteller

Simon Rowe grew up in small town New Zealand and big city Australia. He writes short fiction and screenplays from a small room in an old house overlooking a samurai castle in Himeji city, western Honshu. His stories have appeared in TIME Asia, the New York Times, the Weekend Australian, the South China Morning Post and The Paris Review.