It is self-analysis that the characters consistently engage in as they work to understand their lives and relationships. They’re zoning out in front of televisions, collecting French literature, and having sex-or not having sex while fantasizing about it obsessively and habitually skipping psychiatric appointments. Others are venturing into European-themed coffee shops, listening to Bob Marley in reggae bars, and eating at Red Lobster.
Some are visiting pachinko parlors and shopping at the local fishmonger’s. The people in these Tokyo stories are declaring their independence, struggling to express themselves, afraid of falling behind, confronting middle age, performing small kindnesses for one another on smoke breaks, grappling with contemporary codes of chivalry, and even wondering whether it makes sense to continue on. But Tokyo is more than present enough to justify the book’s title and, in some instances, is rendered vividly, as are the interior worlds of the characters. In his introduction, Michael Emmerich (see WLT, May 2010, 15–17) describes the collection as drawing what may be a more conceptual than physical vision of Tokyo, so it isn’t any surprise that each story doesn’t devote its greatest attention to physical descriptions of the city. Though the stories that follow are less fantastical, the city’s train system is one of the consistent concrete markers of Tokyo that runs throughout the collection. This new collection of short stories by Japanese writers, all set in Tokyo, opens with a monster on a killing spree aboard Tokyo’s train system as it loops twice around the city center. Jim Hinks, Masashi Matsuie & Michael Emmerich, eds. Manchester.
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