Phantasm Japan: Fantasies Light and Dark, From and About Japan Kindle Edition

"Phantasm Japan" is an excellent collection of short stories, half by Japanese writers in translation and half by English-language writers using Japan and Japanese culture for their material.

I should first briefly discuss "fantasy" as it applies to this book. If you think of "fantasy" as set in the past (versus "science fiction" set in the future), this anthology will throw you for a loop. But if you think of "fantasy" as "impossible" (versus science fiction as "might be possible someday"), then this collection will make perfect sense to you. That is to say, several of these stories are set in the present-day or future, but all of them are impossible. Fantasies.

Worth the cover price alone is Project Itoh's take on the career of a certain famous secret agent and his many guises through the years, titled "From The Nothing, With Love." My personal favorite in the bunch is Tim Pratt's "Those Who Hunt Monster Hunters," which starts out sounding like a light, slightly snarky takedown of fedora-wearing schmucks and then turns much darker. I also liked "Girl, I Love You" and "“Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self.” Gary A. Braunbeck's gentle ghost story “Shikata Ga Nai: A Bag Lady’s Tale” is sweetly heartbreaking. And Quentin S. Crisp's "The Last Packet of Tea" is another quiet, poignant, rewarding tale.

Several of the stories in this collection are on the challenging side stylistically, which I consider a bonus not a flaw, and others are challenging conceptually, ditto.There is no fluff. This is all chewy stuff. Fun and thoughtful and strange, all at once. Which is definitely my cup of tea. If it sounds like yours, too, then definitely check it out.

When I was contacted about reviewing Phantasm Japan by its editor, Nick Mamatas, I was excited, because the anthology's premise -- bringing stories about Japan and/or by Japanese writers to a broader public -- sounded really good and I'm always interested in broadening my cultural scope so to speak. So I'm a little sad to report I was somewhat disappointed by this collection of stories. To be fair, this may be because it turns out I'm not the best reader for these stories that have a specific aesthetic and form, which can feel a little choppy story-wise. But mostly it was because there were several stories that just didn't work for me.

Unfortunately, the two stories that worked least for me, were also two of the longest stories in the bunch. In fact, one of them Dempow Torishima's Sisyphean is the longest one clocking in at a whopping 71 pages. Sisyphean was a story that was just too weird for me to parse. There are probably people out there who will love it to bits exactly because of its weirdness, but for me it was just hard to get through all the descriptions and trying to picture them in my mind and I think it got in the way of my appreciating the underlying story, which was interesting; interesting enough for me to wrestle through all of the 71 pages. The other story that didn't work for me at all was Quentin S. Crisp's The Last Packet of Tea, so much so that I couldn't even finish it, in fact I didn't even get past the first five pages. And I tried to read it three times. What bounced me out of the story every time was its prose. The writing just felt very heavy-handed and overly florid. It rarely happens that I just can't finish a story, but this was one such occasion. The story may be brilliant, but I couldn't get past the writing.Read more ›

I picked this book up because I was interested in exploring Japanese fantasy fiction. It’s not a genre I care much about, and I’ve never explored it before, but this collection looked interesting. Japanese fantasy seems so odd and way out there, that I thought I’d give it a try. Overall, it was somewhat interesting, but it didn’t blow me away. My favorite story was “Girl, I Love You,” then followed by the “The Street of Fruiting Bodies,” and “Those Who Hunt Monster Hunters.” I found most of the rest of the stories either decent or underwhelming, but it did not serve the book well to include “Sisyphean” at the end of the book. It was the longest story, at about 70 pages, and was grotesque and incomprehensible.