Japanese Literature (Dalkey) – serie

In addition to 'The Glass Slipper', this collection contains eight other stories held together by a common thread of self-perception: that the self has such depths that at times it can appear to be illusory.

"Wasabi for Breakfast" reintroduces best-selling Japanese author Foumiko Kometani's uniquely humorous voice to American readers. Kometani is rare among Japanese writers and cultural commentators in that she has lived in the United States for most of her adult life, bringing an outsider's--and woman's--perspective to both her adopted home and her native Japan. She lives her life in between cultures, and mines that gap to provide a thoroughly modern take on both societies.In "Family Business," Megumi, a long time resident of the United States, returns to Japan to visit her 87-year-old mother. After so many years living abroad, Megumi is almost as befuddled by the exotic intricacies of contemporary Japan as a foreigner. When her nephew runs away from home, and her elderly mother gives chase, Megumi sets off on a road trip through modern Japan--and her own past."1001 Raging Fires" chronicles a Japanese woman living in California during the Rodney King riots and struggling to come to terms with being an outcast from a society that itself seems to be self-immolating. Yu learns the real price of exclusion is that which your own family makes you pay.

Set during the U.S. Occupation following World War II, Embracing Family is a novel of conflict--between Western and Eastern traditions, between a husband and wife, between ideals and reality. At the opening of the book, Miwa Shunsuke and his wife are trapped in a strained marriage, subtly attacking one another in a manner similar to that of the characters in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? When his wife has an affair with an American GI, Miwa is forced to come to terms with the disintegration of their relationship and the fact that his attempts to repair it only exacerbate the situation. An award-winning novel, critics have read this book as a metaphor of postwar Japanese society, in which the traditional moral and philosophical basis of Japanese culture is neglected in favor of Western conventions.

The Temple of the Wild Geese, a semi-autobiographical account of Mizukami's childhood, tells the tale of Jinen, a Buddhist monk raised by villagers after his mother, a beggar, abandoned him. Sent to live at a temple at the age of ten, his resentment smolders for years until it explodes in a shocking climax. In Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, no woman is willing to marry the diminutive Kisuke, a bamboo artisan, until Tamae, a prostitute, comes to pay her respects at the grave of Kisuke's father. In Tamae, Kisuke sees shadows of his own mother, who died when he was young, and the two eventually marry. Since Kisuke seeks only motherly affection from Tamae, the two never become lovers. Instead, Tamae devotes herself to caring for Kisuke as a mother would, and he thrives as a renowned maker of bamboo dolls.

Hino's novels have been compared to the work of J. G. Ballard. Available for the first time in English: his masterpiece "Island of Dreams."

"I can never remember stories, plot outlines," says one of the characters in this novel, "Dramatic events or flashy stories, anything like that..."

Businessman Yuki Yajima is fifty-one years old. He and his wife, Asako, are the parents of two daughters: Ryo, seventeen, and Yuka, an infant of only two months. Asking himself why he's allowed himself to become a father again at his age, Yuki begins to remember his uncle, who died quite young--younger, indeed, than Yuki is now. Thinking of this man, whom the young Yuki idolized, and who first introduced the boy to authors like Kenzaburo Oe and the Marquis de Sade, serves as a strange tipping point: allowing a sense of chaos and complexity back into his otherwise well-heeled life. A rare work of fiction focused simply on a man of integrity--a dying breed, in novels--"The Shadow of a Blue Cat" meticulously renders his life and opinions as Yuki tries to find a middle path between the radicalism of his uncle's life and the quiet bourgeois home he's worked so hard to build.