Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories

Desire, extreme weather, and uncanny events figure into this stellar collection’s five stories. In Nobuko Takagi’s “The Hole in the Sky,” an unhappy 45-year-old university administrator whose dishonest husband is away on business drives through the rain preceding a typhoon's landfall in Fukuoka and meets a strange, storm-chasing boy. “Husband in a Box” by Tomoko Yoshida centers on a housewife whose shut-in husband—who happens to be extremely small—ventures outside for the first time to attend an opera with her. Taruho Inagaki’s “The False Mustache” is a dreamlike story of queer desire in which a middle school boy privately acts out his favorite scene in a movie, the death of a naked soldier, and is caught by the young man who is boarding with the boy’s family. “Hot Day” by Takako Takahashi begins with a man and a woman meeting in a run-down fishing port for a tryst; when there are no hotel rooms available, they take an endless walk in the blazing heat that turns surreal and hallucinatory. Taeko Kono’s “Cage of Sand” follows an unnamed middle-aged woman whose composure begins to crack when her husband leaves her alone for months at a time. All five entries are wonderful and provocative. For fans of contemporary Japanese fiction, it’s a must-read. (Mar.)