When an old text is translated for the first time, it suggests a galaxy of other texts, still waiting to be translated. Just how much is out there that we don’t know about? Tetsuo Miura’s writing has never been translated into English before, but to judge by “Shame in the Blood” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 216 pages, $24.95), from 1964, he is an outstanding writer, and one who should be of particular interest to Western readers. Mr. Miura’s collection of stories describes a shift in ethical tone, a battle between traditional superstition and individuated will. Specifically, it deals with responses to suicide.

Ritual suicide was glorified in Japanese literature as late as 1966, when Yukio Mishima wrote his superb short story “Patriotism,” in which a young officer commits seppuku. “Shame in the Blood” foregrounds another form of suicide: the personal, unexplained kind. The unnamed narrator of these stories is the youngest of six siblings — two of whom have killed themselves, and two others of whom have disappeared, for good. “When I was about ten years old,” the narrator says, “I thought that dying meant committing suicide.” After the first suicide, the narrator laments, the entire family slipped easily into decline. And one of those last two siblings, before leaving, also defrauded the family, so that the once-prosperous family of traders now lives a shamefully reduced life.

Mr. Miura, who himself lost four siblings to suicide, gives his fictional avatar a difficult challenge: Should he, considering his family history, have a child? Mr. Miura uses all the tools at a novelist’s disposal — epiphanies of desire, convincing romance, and delicately rendered parental expectations — to illustrate what may have been for him a very tough issue. His fictional avatar finally decides to have a child when he finds a list of possible baby names compiled by his recently deceased father.

When “Shame in the Blood” appeared, Japan was experiencing a heady wave of literary triumphs, among them a book very similar to Mr. Miura’s. The 1960s saw not only Mishima’s “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy and his spectacular 1970 suicide, but also the inauguration of Kobo Abe and Kenzaburo Oe’s careers. Abe’s “Woman in the Dunes” was published in 1962, staking out a mainstream market for avant-garde work. But Oe’s “A Personal Matter” bears close comparison to Mr. Miura’s book. Also autobiographical, “A Personal Matter” tells the story of a man with a severely disabled child. These two quasi-memoirs spoke to a new Japanese worldview that saw misfortune as both personal and random.

Old-fashioned concepts of shame are still very much alive in Mr. Miura’s stories. A blush, in this fiction, is an important dramatic cue, and a character who can suppress her own sense of shame gains a great advantage over others. The narrator’s sister-in-law grows saucy under the influence of the restaurant where she works, and he feels embarrassed not by any specific thing she says, but by the sheer physical confidence of her talk: “I groaned, overpowered by Sayoko’s quickfire speech.” Sayoko then does a perfect imitation of the narrator, recalling the time he visited his future father-in-law’s deathbed: “Sayoko placed both fists on her knees and lowered her head shyly, in imitation of me.” An alien detail, to Western readers, the fists on the knees gesture seems to sit in the narrator’s conscience, like an icon.

When, as a boy, the narrator first learns that his elder sister had not died of natural causes, his schoolmates taunt him: “Your sister was eaten by a dolphin, your sister was eaten by a dolphin! … You’re the only one who doesn’t know! You should be ashamed of yourself.” As a youngster, the narrator is so disoriented by his sisters’ suicides that he has to seriously ask himself: “Is it sad when someone dies?” He doesn’t know. But, profound though the psychological situation is, Mr. Miura sticks to a storyteller’s right of assertion. Here is the scene where the narrator first learns, by opening one of his father’s letters, that his elder brother has probably killed himself: “There was no one else in the field, and yet I felt so ashamed that I didn’t know where to hide. I crumpled up the letter and threw it into a stream, then made myself keep walking as the smoke of a field bonfire filled my throat.” Mr. Miura invents the stream as he needs it; he conjures up a bonfire that is only barely not a metaphor.

But what makes “Shame in the Blood” so interesting, to us, is the way it illustrates the shifting values of a foreign culture. To recover from his family legacy, the narrator realizes he must reprogram himself. “I felt a terrible self-loathing when I realized that my life would be a constant struggle against my own blood.” It is a remarkable sentiment, coming out of postwar Japan — that self-reinvention must be accompanied by shame and self-loathing. Nevertheless, the narrator wins his struggle. At the beginning of the book, he is wandering around Tokyo, declaring that it is pointless to seek out pre-war ghosts. But by the end, he has decided not only to face them but to defy them, as a rule. He decides to have a baby precisely because, he says, it is “ill-advised.”

blytal@nysun.com