The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories by Kurahashi Yumiko

Continuing its excellent Japanese Women in Translation series, the publisher presents a brief sampling of the richly mythological, fantastical work of an author active in Japanese experimental fiction since the early 1960s but little-known in the West. Kurahashi is influenced by classical Noh theater, especially in her use of masks. In ""The Trade,"" a man is pursued in a dream by a hideous mask; when he finds his actual face transformed into the mask (""a face so malignantly ugly that you could never forget it once you had seen it""), he must then seek to trade for someone else's face. In ""The Witch Mask,"" a man who has inherited a ghastly mask of a witch feels an irresistible urge to set it upon the beautiful face of his fiancee and watch, sadistically, as she writhes until she dies. Other tales, especially the title story, bear the unmistakable shadow of the dark fabulists Poe and Hoffmann. The selections traverse an entire career (the most recent story is dated 1991), and the autobiographical pieces, such as the final story about the symbiosis between a dying father and his daughter, merit closer reading than some of the more contrived postmodern experiments. The translation is wooden in parts, which Sakaki acknowledges in her introduction, but even so the volume gives ample evidence of Kurahashi's dreamlike, sometimes disturbing, charm. (Dec.)