NEW JAPANESE VOICES: THE BEST CONTEMPORARY FICTION FROM JAPAN

I was delighted with this collection, which lives up to the fine literary legacy of Endo, Tanazaki, et al. There is a special quality to Japanese literature. A spiritual angst, coupled with sardonic humor, attention to detail, a reverence for nature, and the existential plight of the individual psyche. All of this is evident in this fine contemporary collection, edited by Helen Mitsios. There are two big names that American readers will be familiar with: Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto. Both of their selections are good. Yoshimoto's is from her novel, KITCHEN. It is written with delicacy and sensitivity to the loneliness of life. The other standouts were "Swallowtails" by Shiina Mokoto, which is from the point of view of a desperate father whose strange son seems to be going down a bad path. This story ends on a lyrical note. There are two surrealistic stories, one in which a young woman is impregnated by a giant bee ,"On A Moonless Night, by Sei Takekawa and "Living In A Maze," by Kyoji Kobayashi, in which a woman turns into a cow. These stories are eerily realistic, and the latter is quite humorous and touching at the same time. I love Japanese humor with its sardonic edge. Perhaps the funniest story in the collection is "The Unsinkable Molly Brown", by Tamio Kageyama. An obese woman tries to scuba dive, but cannot sink. All of the stories deal with people who are unique. In one, "Yu-Hee, by Yang Ji Lee, a woman lives in the ambiguous love/hate world between Korea and Japan. All of these writers have won awards. Kudos to the editor for an almost equal distribution of male and female writers (7-5) and for highlighting the work of each translator. All of the translations read seamlessly. Without translators, those of us who don't read Japanese, would be missing the unique experience of reading contemporary Japanese literature.

Interesting collection. Some better than others. None as good as Murakami's Men Without Women.Great way to get a snapshot of contemporary Japanese writing.

I appreciated getting to know more contemporary Japanse authors, but from all the stories in this book collection, I only liked about half of them. I'll be adding some new authors to my list of authors that I really like, like Murakami and Yoshimoto.

Great short stories.

All of it was good. Very enjoyable.

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" generation�having 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 West�with the notable exceptions of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto who both have many novels in translation. Their two pieces�Murakami's a quick riff, and Yoshimoto's an excerpt from her novel Kitchen�are 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 came across this quite by accident and was truly taken with the quality of these stories. I recognized none of the authors except for Murakami, but being in love with all kinds of Japanese art, I found that these stories were truly dazzling. How editor Mitsios found these authors is astounding. None of these stories are too long and several are memorable. Find this book and enjoy!

I notice Helen Mitsios says she has just stumbled across this collection of stories which in fact she edited herself, and has here awarded it 5 stars.This happened to me once. I was at a conference with a colleague where we found ourselves greatly admiring a paper included in the conference literature. We got to the last page and discovered we were the authors!