Customer Reviews

New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan (A Morgan Entrekin book)

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A decade has passed since this collection was first published, so it's a little difficult to still consider these voices "new", especially when you consider that all twelve writers fall firmly within what is known in American as the "Baby Boomer" generationhaving been born between 1944-64. It's also hard to consider them "new" voices since all had written multiple novels when this book was published. As such, it should come as no surprise that while the stories are almost all set firmly in modern Japan, none of them is particularly surprising or edgy in any way.

Ten years on, most of the writers in the collection remain unknown in the Westwith the notable exceptions of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto who both have many novels in translation. Their two piecesMurakami's a quick riff, and Yoshimoto's an excerpt from her novel Kitchenare quite good. Two stories about children, Shiina Makoto's "Swallowtails" and Itoh Seikoh's "God Is Nowhere" are among the more promising ones, and make one wish for more in translation. Mariko Hayashi's story "Wine", about a young women on a vacation who mistakenly purchases an extremely expensive bottle of wine which then becomes a social burden to her, is an interesting piece. Tamio Kageyama's "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" is the only story that can be considered comic, and makes a nice change of pace.

Genichiro Takahashi's "The Imitation of Leibniz" starts promisingly with a star baseball player faced with the conundrum of being in a slump, yet not in a slump, but suffers from an awful translation that interferes with the philosophy that follows. Two stories (Sei Takekawa's "On a Moonless Night" and Kyoji Kobayashi's "Living in a Maze") meander into magical realism of a sort with rather unsatisfactory results. The other three stories are fairly forgettable pieces. All in all, the anthology feels somewhat dated, but is worth skimming for a few pieces here and there.

I just came across this book and it's the finest collection of Japanese stories I've ever read. I have only one question. When is the next collection coming out? I can't wait to read it!