Japan: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Traveler's Literary Companions)

The literary companion series has the beautiful aim of introducing a range of foreign writers. This book on Japan was published in 2006 and contained 12 works by as many writers. There were 7 short stories, 4 essays and 1 excerpt from a novel. The pieces were set in the cities of Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto as well as the regions of northern Honshu, Kumano (a mountainous region south of Nara), the Sea of Japan coast, Kyushu and Okinawa.The oldest writers were Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), Yasushi Inoue (1907-91), two of Japan's best-known authors, as well as Sakunosuke Oda (1913-47). The "youngest" were Tsuyoshi Shima (1939-), Kenji Nakagami (1946-92) and Teru Miyamoto (1947-). Also included was Saiichi Maruya (1925-), called a wry commentator on the nation's culture, and Mutsuo Takahashi (1937-), described as one of Japan's most prominent living poets.The pieces ranged from an essay published in 1944 on a neighborhood in Osaka to an essay published in 2001 on its author's care for her dog. The 1990s and 2000s were represented by just two works. Seven of the pieces came from the 1970s and 80s, the rest were earlier.This collection differed in a few ways from most of the ones read thus far for other countries in this traveler's series. First, the number of selections for Japan was on the low side, at just 12. Second, very few pieces from the 1990s and 2000s were included. Third, most of the writers were quite old and younger contemporary authors were omitted.This book's presentation seemed different especially when compared with the two other Asian books in the series, on China and Vietnam. The book on China had a range of older and newer works, many of which contained heavy criticism and mockery of contemporary society and human behavior. In the book on Vietnam, the works were almost entirely from the 1980s and 90s and likewise contained much social criticism, expressed obliquely or otherwise. Such criticism, scope and contemporaneity seemed virtually absent from the collection on Japan.On the other hand, a number of the pieces and writers in the Japan collection did communicate a sense of place, in terms of physical description of the locations or evocations of an author's memory of it. Among them, Hino's anonymous streets in Tokyo, Maruya's working-class neighborhood in the east that served as a background for a young couple's hesitant courtship, Inoue's Mt. Bandai, Oda's neighborhood in Osaka, Mizukami's stream in Fukui Prefecture recalled from childhood, and Shima's excavated hillside on Okinawa.There was beautiful writing here on memory, the passage of time and loss, especially Mizukami's recollections of his mother in her prime and his feelings for her, and Takahashi's description of the time before and after his mother's disappearance. Or the uncovering of the past, as the workers in Shima's story dug deeper at a hotel construction site in Okinawa. Something grimly humorous was Atoda's story set partly in Kyoto, revealing other problems that lay beneath the surface. Something more difficult in style and content was Nakagami's ambiguous "The Immortal," in which an unhinged pilgrim in the forest may have encountered a spirit.Tada's essay on her dog felt slight initially, but turned out to be one of the few pieces that seemed to express a writer's overall sense of peace, despite the suffering of a loss, as well as her comfort in her present surroundings. It counterbalanced nicely the darkness and displacement found in many of the other pieces. But many of the other stories too were about the acceptance of loss, and the human ability to endure. So despite the age of most of the pieces, the themes of many were timeless.This reader wondered if it was just a coincidence that most of the works in this anthology predated Japan's crass bubble years and their aftermath, and that all of the authors in it came of age before that time. In any case, more contemporary mentalities and urban locations, less refined but more immediately recognizable, can be found in collections like Monkey Brain Sushi (1991), New Japanese Voices (1991), and Inside and Other Short Fiction (2006), particularly in works by writers like Yoshinori Shimizu and Genichiro Takahashi, and younger writers like Yuzuki Muroi and Tamaki Daido. And in short-story anthologies by Hideo Okuda like In the Pool (2002) and Lala Pipo (2005) as well as the uneven but socially satirical collection by the older writer Yasutaka Tsutsui, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (2006).

Some of these stories are beautiful and haunting, particularly Keizo's Jacob's Tokyo Ladder, Atoda's The Destiny of Shoes, and Miyamoto's The Swallow's Nest. You get a wide variety of stories and different translators. And so some might be less than great but the gems among this collection are well worth it.

Yes, perfect companion for a trip to Japan!