“Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories”
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.
In a brief editor’s introduction, Sarah Coolidge explains that, “Assembled here, these stories take on the glow of the ‘rare and unusual fragments’”, a reference from one of the volume’s stories. “As you read through this collection, I hope you feel that same wonder, that same sense of dizzying awe.”
The collection is dizzying indeed. The stories here are truly bizarre, impenetrable beyond the fare on offer in the short stories of even the most avant garde contemporary Japanese writers available in English translation like, say, Sayaka Murata. Coolidge’s introduction promises Japanese writing at “its strangest and most perverse”. The collection delivers.
Even for a reader familiar with Japanese literature, the connections between these five stories aren’t easy to find. Several take up motherhood, a familiar theme for frequent readers of Japanese fiction. (2025 alone sees English translations of multiple books where it’s at issue: Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird, Saou Ichikawa’s Hunchback, Yuko Tsushima’s Wildcat Dome, and Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World—due out in April.) Takagi’s “The Hole in the Sky” features a teenager who hopes the eye of a typhoon will return his dead mother to him. The protagonist of Yoshida’s “Husband in a Box” fights with her mother-in-law for a role in her husband’s life. In Kono’s “Cage of Sand”, the absence of children is conspicuous in the relationship between a protagonist and her husband who disappears on long, unexplained trips. They also take up other important feminist concerns, like sexual assault in Takahashi’s “Hot Day”. Even Inagaki’s “The False Moustache” examines the relationship between femaleness and queerness.
“The False Moustache” is one of the standout stories in the collection. It’s the story of a gay teen’s sexual awakening. (English language readers might be surprised to learn about the long and complicated history of authors exploring male-male love in Japan. Although the subject had become somewhat risqué by the time Inagaki was writing, no writer would have met with dire social or legal consequences like those he would have faced in the UK or the US for writing a similar story.) With echoes of the sadistic homoeroticism of Yukio Mishima (Inagaki’s junior by some 35 years), the protagonist of “The False Moustache” is alarmed and intrigued by the sight of American corpses piled up after a losing battle with Native Americans in a film he once saw:
heaps and heaps of corpses of nude soldiers—yes, that’s right—without even a single stitch of clothing. When he realized what he was seeing, the boy stared at the screen with eyes wide open in surprise. Was it really okay to film a scene like that?
He notes one corpse’s “suggestive, sensual beauty” and decides he wants to imitate the dead man’s pose. He is, perhaps inevitably, caught in a compromising position by a young man temporarily living in his house. The young man initiates a relationship. Even when the two are observed, he passes the encounters off as normal—“This would look bad if he [the teen] was a girl!” The story continues to explore the inherent femininity of the teen’s desire for the young man as the teen comes to feel like “a fourteen-year-old bride” in the arms of his slightly older lover.
Another notable story is Yoshida’s “Husband in a Box”. Like all of the other stories in Unusual Fragments, it’s more inscrutable than “The False Moustache”. Yasuko’s husband is tiny. Although Yoshida’s narrator never describes his physical appearance clearly, she does drop hints—he is seriously injured in a fight with a cat, he has “long, black fingernails”, the top of his head is flat, he moves faster on all fours, and he has never left the house. One day, he surprises Yasuko with one opera ticket and a promise he’s going to take her to see Mozart’s The Magic Flute. They’re both thrilled:
Just thinking about it made me happy. A real opera, with my real husband… This one opera would be enough to last a lifetime. An opera I’d always dreamed of seeing. I was sure he hadn’t bought just the one ticket out of stinginess. He wanted to go with me as one, body and soul.
After careful logistical planning, Yasuko designs the titular box in which she can carry him there and sit him in her lap to watch. Throughout, Yasuko’s mother-in-law—the story’s primary antagonist—watches the proceedings with apprehension and contempt, waiting for an impending disaster.
For seasoned readers of Japanese fiction, the strongest appeal of Unusual Fragments may be the translators whose work appears in the volume. Jeffrey Angles (Taruho Inagaki’s “The False Moustache”) frequently translates the poetry and prose of queer Japanese men, including Mutsuo Takahashi; he is also responsible for notable translations of Shigeru Kayama’s Godzilla and Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller. Brian Bergstrom translates books that are a little “off the beaten path” like Erika Kobayashi’s Trinity, Trinity, Trinity, Marxist philosopher Kohei Saito’s non-fiction Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and Maki Sato’s delightful picture book Animals Brag about Their Bottoms. Margaret Mitsutani (Yoshida’s “Husband in a Box”) is Yoko Tawada’s main English-language translator, working on books like The Emissary, Scattered All over the Earth, and Three Streets. Lucy North (Kono’s “Cage of Sand”) is a prominent translator and co-founder of the Strong Women, Soft Power translation collective partially responsible for the large number of Japanese women whose work is now available in translation; North has translated other work by Taeko Kono—likely the best-known writer to appear in Unusual Fragments—notably the collection Toddler Hunting and Other Stories. Philip Price (Takagi’s “The Hole in the Sky”) also translates from Georgian and has translated work by another Japanese woman writer mostly unknown in English, Junko Hasegawa.
Unusual Fragments itself is also unusual, though lovely, as a physical artifact. Its dimensions—17.4cm x 15.19cm (6.8” x 6.0”)—are themselves uncustomary, as is Marie-Noëlle Hébert’s interior design. Each chapter begins with a double-sided artistic rendering of the story’s title in both Japanese print, stylized written Japanese, and English.
But the greatest importance of Unusual Fragments lies not so much in the translators, nor the design, nor even in the stories themselves, but rather in the presentation to English readers of a group of important Japanese writers who are virtually unknown to the English-speaking world. As Coolidge observes in her introduction
Unusual Fragments asks us to reconsider who or what defines the Japanese canon. With so few writers making their way into English translation over the past century, English readers have been exposed to only a small slice of Japanese literature.
Over the last decade, Japanese literary fiction from Japan has come to be dominated by women—Hiromi Kawakami, Mieko Kawakami, Sayaka Murata, Yoko Ogawa, Yoko Tawada and others. (Because of genre fiction and the continuing translation of older Japanese literary fiction, slightly more than half of all translated Japanese fiction overall is written by men.) But when it comes to 20th century literary fiction, the selection in English is sadly limited—especially the fiction by female authors. When English readers base their impressions of 20th century Japan on Osamu Dazai, Yukio Mishima and Haruki Murakami, they get a male-dominated, often sexist—and heteronormative—picture of life in Japan that goes unchallenged by the very Japanese voices who were challenging the Japanese literary establishment in Japan fifty or more years ago.
As promised, Unusual Fragments is a glimpse into a broader and richer world of 20th century Japanese fiction than most English readers even know exists.
