The superb Kondansha publication, Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia, has a lengthy entry on Mori Ogai (1862-1922). From a family of "hereditary domain physicians", he went from medical school into the army as a doctor; studied in Germany from 1884-88; rose through the ranks  of  the army medical corps and became a celebrated novelist and translator in the early modern period of Japanese literature.

He wrote the novella, Gan,  between 1911-13. Now it has made a most welcome transition to English as The Wild Goose in the translation of Meredith McKinney and as a beautiful small book published by the not-for-profit firm of Finlay Lloyd. McKinney has translated Japanese novels into English for Penguin Classics; teaches translation at the Australian National University and has co-translated a selection of poems by her mother, Judith Wright, into Japanese.

The Wild Goose is narrated by an anonymous medical student (whom McKinney styles "a disinterested bystander") who opens his long yarn in that equable tone that he sustains throughout: "This is an old story. The events took place in 1880, the thirteenth year of the Meiji era." It was a period of excitement for the young, disquiet for the more traditional, as Japan sought to open itself in order to learn from the West. As Ogai had, one of the main characters – Okada, a medical student at Tokyo University – leaves Japan and the story in which he has played a catalytic role to go to university in Germany. The narrator concludes by casually remarking that 35 years have passed since these events. He learned half the story through his friendship with fellow student Okada, the rest when he came to know Otama, a late teenager in 1880. How that came about, he says disarmingly, "lies outside the scope of this tale".

The events of The Wild Goose are compressed in time (a couple of seasons pass) and in space. The story opens in a boarding house across from Tokyo University’s Iron Gate and the narrator takes us around the salient points in the neighbourhood (there is a handy map provided as well). These include Ueno Hill, the candy stall of Otama’s widowed father in Akihanohera, the student dormitory on the Todo estate where the janitor, Suezo, parlays his job into that of moneylender to the students. This gives him the means to install the beautiful Otama in "the lonely house near the sewing school" in Muenzaka.

Numerous other fictions are woven through Ogai’s narrative – 17th-century Chinese stories, historical romances, parables. At a key moment, the narrator reflects on portrayals of misers in fiction and decides that Suezo is one of those who "might be mean and yet have a weakness for expensive women".

The characters to whom we are introduced are unillusioned. Even the youthful Otama is "fully resigned to the fact that she was selling herself to save her father from poverty". Thinking of how Suezo treats his boorish wife, Otsune, Otama judges that "if he lies to her like this, he’s not going to be completely truthful with me either". The young kept woman is "stricken with ennui" after a while, hence more likely to be intrigued by the affable student who passes by on his daily walks.

Ogai works towards a droll, protracted anticlimax that involves a stinking serve of boiled fish, a tame and unfortunate goose, student pranks and unrequited longing. Then he cuts to the coda cited above, as though he has done as much as he wanted with a fiction that also contains an uncertain measure of autobiography. However, he has proffered a worldly entertainment to which McKinney’s translation – so far as one can determine – does ample justice.