Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin (January 1, 1972)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 249 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140034269
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140034264
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces

This book came out in 1972, compiled by Yukio Mishima and Geoffrey Bownas. It was part of an admirable series published by Penguin in the late 60s/early 70s on new writing in many parts of world (Japan, Cuba, elsewhere in Latin America, England, the U.S., France, Italy, Germany, Africa/South Africa). One volume was devoted to each place.

The volume on Japan contained 66 works by 18 writers. There were 7 short stories, 3 essays, 1 piece of reportage, 54 poems, and 1 excerpt from a poem. The prose was about 80% of the book; half of the poems were haiku or tanka -- quite short. Most of the selections in the book were undated but came from the 1950s and 60s. The oldest author in the collection was an obscure poet, Hatsu Mizushima (1896-?), the youngest was the poet Mutsuo Takahashi (1937-). Most of the writers were born in the 1920s and 30s, making them contemporaries or juniors of Mishima.

For the prose, some of the works seemed well chosen, others less so. There were early tales from the 1950s by major voices Kobe Abe and Kenzaburo Oe. In Abe's hallucinatory stories inspired by Kafka, male narrators were transformed into animate objects. In Oe's story, a boy narrated a wartime experience with an American POW that ended into horror.

A piece by popular novelist Shintaro Ishihara, observing a skirmish fought by U.S. troops in Vietnam, seemed apt for the 60s. Mishima's own tale in the collection, "Patriotism" -- about the suicide of a patriotic officer and his wife at the close of World War II -- is among the best stories he wrote, and one of the outstanding works in the anthology. Written in 1960, it can be read both for itself and as a prophecy of the author's end. (By the time this anthology came out, Mishima, an ultrarightist and sensitive chronicler of obsession, had been dead for two years.)

Some of the other prose choices in the book were puzzling. A rambling essay by Taruho Inagaki dancing around the subject of Icarus but making no particular statement, a murky tale by Yutaka Haniya involving a narrator obsessed with a mirror as a "tool of the devil," and a long-winded, philosophical essay by Shun Akiyama, spoken by a man who felt cut off from society -- I failed to grasp the point of these, unless it was to express the anxiety of the times and a retreat into self-contemplation.

Two tales focused on lowlife. In a story from the 50s by Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, a man recorded sensitively his shifting feelings toward a prostitute. In a tale by Shotaro Yasuoka set during wartime, a student pawned goods to pay for brothels and grew close to a pawnbroker's wife. In terms of Japanese prose writing since 1945, a focus on lowlife didn't seem all that new.

The collection was interesting as much for its omissions as for its selections. All female prose writers of note were excluded (Fumiko Enchi, Harumi Setouchi, Taeko Kono, Setsuko Tsumura, Minako Oba, Sawako Ariyoshi, Yumiko Kurahashi). The several obscure, lesser works were favored over anything from the many other new voices of the 1950s or 60s (Junzo Shono, Shusako Endo, Saiichi Maruya, Morio Kita, Takeshi Kaiko, Akiyuki Nosaka, Yasutaka Tsutsui). Mishima's rival on the left, Shuji Terayama, was omitted. On subjects like families, husbands and wives, parents and children, the layers of Japanese society -- and women's interior lives especially -- there was almost nothing.

The introduction by Mishima contained arresting metaphors, but seemed insufficiently clear in isolating the themes of the prose in the collection or the motivations behind the choices. It was understandable that the editors didn't want to show a Japan that foreign readers knew and expected. But in trying so hard to confound expectations -- and give so much attention to alienation -- maybe they sacrificed too much.

Some of the poetry was well worth reading. The selections ranged from contemplative and restrained in the 1950s to exuberant and abandoned in the 1960s. The exuberance was provided mainly by Kazuko Shiraishi, who wrote with a refreshing sexual openness that called to mind later writers Ryu Murakami and Amy Yamada. And Mutsuo Takahashi, a gay poet and friend of Mishima who wrote about sensation with intense physicality.

Two poems by Takashi Tsujii expressed the confusion of the times ("Disorder was the order of the age"). The image of a city's roads stretching to a horizon no one could name apparently referred to a foreign land, but might just as well have been taken to express cultural dislocation in Japan. It was a surprise to learn that Tsujii was the pen name of former CP member and later Saison Group conglomerate owner Seiji Tsutsumi.

Other poets in the collection included Shuntaro Tanikawa, called the most widely read poet in postwar Japan; Ryuichi Tamura; Kunio Tsukamoto, a dominant tanka poet of the period; and Minoru Yoshioka, a leading surrealist poet. The poetry of Shuji Terayama might've been added to the collection.

Later anthologies that contain a fair number of prose works from Japan from the 1950s and 60s -- with selections that are maybe a bit less idiosyncratic -- are The Mother of Dreams (1986), The Showa Anthology (1985), and Contemporary Japanese Literature (1977).

Earlier anthologies include Donald Keene's Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (1956), the Japan Quarterly's Modern Japanese Short Stories (1960), Ivan Morris's Modern Japanese Stories (1962), and Jay Gluck's Ukiyo: Stories of Postwar Japan (1963).