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4.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining Anthology by Expats, 7 Nov 2008
This anthology was published in 1997 and contained 33 short stories and 3 excerpts from novels. The selections were from 36 non-Japanese authors who'd written fiction in English about Japan since World War II. More than half of the authors were living in Japan at the time the collection was published; the others had spent time there earlier. The goal of the book was to reflect the "variety of the expatriate experience."
More than two-thirds of the writers hailed from the United States. The others included several Englishmen, two Australians, the Irishman David Burleigh, the London-born Swiss/British-Indian Meira Chand, the Japanese-born American Cheryl Chow, the Haitian-born American Michelle Leigh, and a Canadian-born American writing under the fetching pen name "Kate the Slops." Twelve of the authors were women. A few writers were of Asian or African-American background; the great majority of the authors were white.
The best-known older writers included Hal Porter from Australia, James Kirkup, John Haylock, Francis King and Frank Tuohy from England, and Donald Richie, Edward Seidensticker and Philip Whalen from the United States. Others who were published novelists in fiction/nonfiction included the Australian John Bryson and the Americans Alan Brown, Alex Kerr and Phyllis Birnbaum. A number of the authors were also translators -- among them, Seidensticker, Kirkup, Birnbaum, Sanford Goldstein, William Wetherall and Ralph McCarthy.
Twenty-two of the stories were written or first published in the 1990s. Seven were from the 1980s, five from the 1970s, and two from the 1960s. The earliest was a piece by Seidensticker written in 1961. An introduction by Richie mentioned the difficulty of finding fiction for the early postwar decades, since much of it appeared in obscure and vanished periodicals or was never published.
Richie's introduction also summarized the various approaches of the collection's authors: focusing on the foreigner and his/her relation to Japan; looking at the country through a Japanese discipline like the tea ceremony, ikebana, bonsai or haiku; using the Japanese as a means to define one's own self; or describing a Japanese character from his/her own point of view. It was noted that a number of the authors concentrated on the differences from their home countries, compared the self from their own country and the self emerging in Japan, or sought in one way or another to come to terms with the country. It was claimed that such writing contrasted with that produced by the many expatriates who flocked to Paris but generally avoided making France or the French the subject of their work.
Of the stories concerned more or less with foreigners coming to terms in Japan, enjoyed most were one about a foreign woman trying to make sense of the behavior of the people around her, comparing them to herself, while trying not to worry too much about her uncertain future (Kate the Slops). And one in which a lonely foreign teacher tried to communicate with a woman to whom he was attracted (Gibson). The story by Birnbaum skillfully contrasted cultures and was full of subtle parallels and contrasts between the behavior of Japanese and foreign characters.
Tuohy's work, which gave the anthology its title, also contained many interesting, catty observations. Instead of focusing on one person, it showed a narrator who observed a foreigner and a Japanese acting on differing standards and assumptions, failing to communicate, and ending in tragedy.
Most of the stories in the collection employed straight realism, more or less. Stylistically more adventurous ones from the 1990s included a hallucinatory tale about the love and longing of a cross-cultural couple (Leza Lowitz). And random scenes between a Japanese man and a foreign woman, as if taken from an experimental film (Michelle Leigh). One or two others featured magic realist devices like apparitions that kept crossing a narrator's path (Laurel Ostrow), a face that appeared on a computer screen to embody a narrator's hopes and fears (Elizabeth Balestrieri), or a Japanese "kami" in its shrine mulling changes in the worshippers over the centuries (Christopher Blasdel).
Bryson's story was from the early 1980s -- before the bubble, in the forgotten days when Japan's economic growth was feared. The only tale set in the corporate world, it cut back and forth between a business meeting of Japanese and foreigners and the Japanese firm's elderly president, who sat at home brooding over his son's death in the war while his monolithic company marched forward at the expense of the doomed foreigners. Porter's work from 1970, written in his usual baroque style, had buried within it an interesting tale about the shift over time in the relations between an aging Occupation soldier and the housemaid he'd married decades earlier. One of the more complex and interesting was Francis King's story from the 1970s that moved between an older foreign woman's return to Kyoto after two decades and her encounters with people, places and emotions in the past. She found that her formerly skinny houseboy had turned into a thickset businessman in a suit.
I'd agree with the reviewer who wrote that the anthology was thin in stories that conveyed -- lyrically or otherwise -- the lure of the culture and what kept expatriates in country. Some of the stories might be taken to hint at attractions like the simple kindness found most often in the countryside (Karen Hill Anton), the sense of living tradition, compassion and propriety (Joseph LaPenta, Chand). The pull of what was excitingly strange (Leigh, Lowitz), physically intoxicating (Eric Madeen) or a screen on which one could project one's emotions (Morgan Gibson).
Something else that felt too infrequent in the collection was a view of life from the perspective of Japanese characters. The most serious and thoughtful stories of this type, in my opinion, were one from the 1970s in which an unhappy, materialistic Japanese woman was helped by a wiser Japanese neighbor to gain a clearer understanding of what mattered (Chand). One in which an aging master of ikebana defended old values (LaPenta). Richie's
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Recommended reading for the expat gaijin!, 14 Dec 2000
By A Customer
An excellent collection of short stories about life in modern day Japan. The situations and dilemmas encountered will be all too familiar to those with experience of living in Japan yet also of interest to those yet to visit. The prose styles are varied but all the stories are very well written and cover a wide range of topics. Overall, a highly recommended read.
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