The opening panels of the manga Miss Ruki show the title character working from home processing medical insurance claims. In a voice so dry it verges on sardonic, an unseen narrator explains that Miss Ruki finishes projects weeks earlier than her boss thinks she does, so she spends most of her time reading books from the library—books like Saeke Tsuboi’s anti-war classic Twenty-Four Eyes or Ira Levin’s classic American horror novel Rosemary’s Baby.
Author: Alison Fincher
Izumi lost her husband and her job. Now she spends her time doing craft projects like sewing handmade stuffed animals. She has come to realize that she spent 20 years acting the role of “successful woman”.
Tae Kudo is a neurotic 46-year-old woman who has become something of a hypochondriac in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Some of her experiences will be deeply familiar to most readers—like her caution about masking or disinfecting her groceries. Others, like her hyperfixation on conscious capitalism, the environmental impact of her actions, or even refusing to be in the same room as a houseguest, may not.
Sixth-grader Lina Uesugi received a strange set of instructions from her father before the beginning of summer vacation: “Go to the Misty Valley. There’s a person there who was good to me years ago.” He didn’t explain to her why she should go or what will happen when she arrives. He simply put her on a train from Shizuoka Prefecture, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) down Japan’s eastern coast from Tokyo, to head north and inland.
With no real uniting theme, Unusual Fragments is more of a miscellany than a collection. The authors were born over a span of 78 years. Three of the stories are by women who grew up during the Pacific War—Taeko Kono (1926-2015), Takako Takahashi (1932-2013), and Tomoko Yoshida (1934-). Another is by a woman, Nobuko Takagi (1978-), who was a member of Japan’s “Lost Generation”—Japanese who graduated high school after Japan’s bubble economy popped in 1989. The only male author, Taruho Inagaki (1900-1977), died before Takagi was even born.
At first glance, the premise of Junko Takase’s Akutagawa-Prize-winning novel May You Have Delicious Meals seems like the set-up for a romantic comedy. Nitani, Ashikawa, and Oshio work together in the sales division of a company. Nitani normally dates timid, feminine women like Ashikawa. Nitani and Ashikawa start a relationship. Sometimes Nitani spends his evenings at his apartment with Ashikawa, where she makes him nutritious, homemade meals. He spends other evenings at dive bars with his more brusque and professionally competent female colleague, Oshio.
Several women walk children down a flagstone path to a hot spring in the cozy opening scene of Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird. The children play while the women enjoy the warm water. The narrator has been married for five years to a factory worker. He works while she takes care of the children.
Beginning in 2018, a Japanese person might log on to YouTube only to find a video featuring a thin figure clothed entirely in black. A white papier-mache mask—blank, with holes for eyes and mouth and a peak for the suggestion of the nose—provides the only contrast. The figure speaks in an artificially processed, saccharine voice and posts enigmatic, sometimes uncomfortable videos. One shows the figure awkwardly playing music on a child’s toy piano. Another features the figure receiving an odd and disquieting Christmas gift from a barely visible and sinister Santa-san.
Izumi Suzuki was a Japanese science fiction writer of the 1970s and early 1980s with two collections of short stories currently available in English—Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade of Tears. Both are the collaborative work of several translators, and both were widely lauded for their innovation and biting social commentary. When I reviewed Terminal Boredom for the Asian Review of Books, I noted that, “Suzuki’s feminist spirit is as relevant and her stories as piercing today as they were more than thirty years ago.”
Tomoko lost her father when she was six years old. Now that she’s twelve, she will spend a year living with her mother’s wealthy sister in Ashiya while her mother goes back to school to study dressmaking. Ashiya is a city about two hours east of her childhood home by the brand new shinkansen.
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