cover image Showa Anthology 1

Showa Anthology 1

. Kodansha America, $17.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-87011-739-8

These 25 stories, translated by almost as many scholars, mostly of the younger generation, and billed as the first collection of its kind to appear in over eight years, demonstrate not only that short fiction in Japan is alive and well but that it has adapted to the winds of changenotably in the form of war, foreign literary influence and high-techby cultivating its roots in tradition. Some of the writers represented are well known in the Westfor example, Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, Osamu Dazai, a literary legend in Japan since his suicide in 1948, Kobo Abe (""scientific rationalist'') and Shusako Endo (``the Japanese Graham Greene'')but most are little known outside Japan or hitherto untranslated; among them six women, one the daughter of Dazai, another described as having perhaps ``the most fertile literary imagination in Japan today.'' There's a striking diversity of moods and modes, the narratives being variously lyric, comic, tragic, satiric, fantastic and experimental. Some are gemlike exercises in the famous ``I-novel'' tradition; in others, strains of Stendhal, Sartre or Kafka mingle with indigenous traditions going back to the 10th century. All the stories shine, and each is a telling vignette of the human condition. January