Japan

The best writers from Japan guide you through a land of seeming contradictions.

"This is an excellent collection of autobiographical essays and short stories. The stories are chosen to be evocative of some of the ways that people in various locations around Japan have lived, paying attention to its diversity, and this admirably achieved. . . . well worth having."
--Japanese Studies

This collection guides the reader through the complexity that is Japan. Although frequently misunderstood as a homogenous nation, Japan is a land of tremendous linguistic, geographical, and cultural diversity. Hino Keizo leads the reader through Tokyo's mazes in "Jacob's Tokyo Ladder." Nakagami Kenji explores the ghostly, mythology-laden backwoods of Kumano. Atoda Takashi takes us to Kyoto to follow the mystery of a pair of shoes and discover the death of a stranger. The stories, like the country and the people, are beautiful and compelling.

Let these literary masters be your guide -- from the beauty of northern Honshu through the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, to the many temples in Kyoto, through Osaka and the coastline of the Sea of Japan, and down to southern Kyūshū -- to a Japan that only the finest stories can reveal.

"This cunningly constructed anthology affirms, among other things, the nature of Japan. In the West (particularly in the United States) leaving home, making your way in the world, is still deemed somehow a virtue. In Japan (and some other Asian countries, perhaps) staying in the furusato [hometown] and trying to return to it are somehow equal virtues.

Indeed, many of the authors represented in this anthology are attempting through their work to describe or to define their own position in regard to the places where they were born or those that became their homes. By the act of writing, the authors embrace the furusato, helping to construct those internal homelands that form the cognitive map of Japan.

In Japan a sense of place retains a social value, and the differences between Tōkyō and Kyōto (as well as those between Hokkaidō and Kyūshū) are strongly perceived and consequently quite real. It is because of this that the sampler you now hold in your hands suggests a world of diversity, a small place of great variance, a paradigm of an irregular but balanced world."

Translators: Lawrence Rogers, Dennis Keene, Stephen W. Kohl, Burton Watson, Anthony Hood Chambers, Jeffrey Angles, Millicent M. Horton, Mark Harbison, Kyoko Omori, Michael Emmerich, and William J. Tyler.

JAPAN, edited by Jeffrey Angles and & J. Thomas Rimer, foreword by Donald Richie, $14.95, ISBN # 1-883513-16-2