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amotwell's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
3.5
This is an anthology, so some items were more interesting to me than others. Kenzaburo Oe's "The Catch" was an interesting story written from the point of view of a child in a Japanese village where the residents had custody of a prisoner of war during WWII. "Ambush" by Shintaro Ishihara was another interesting wartime story. War stories and World War II settings aren't my favorite, but I don't believe I've ever read anything from a Japanese perspective, and I did find that interesting. "The Simple Life" by Shun Akiyama reminded me of the writings of Fernando Pessoa and maybe a little bit of Hermann Hesse, but I found it a little more tedious or maybe ponderous than either of those authors. The overall tone of the anthology seemed rather nihilistic and hopeless and depressing. There was a fantasy and/or symbolic element to some of the stories, and I may not have had the necessary cultural context to understand those elements in particular, or maybe the stories more generally. While I have enjoyed some forms of Japanese poetry elsewhere, I did not particularly enjoy any of the poetry in this book. To some extent, I am not sure if I'm responding to Japanese literature and culture, or maybe I'm responding to 1972, when this anthology was originally published. In some ways, I think 1972 might be more culturally distant from me than Japan.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide
Moderate: Sexual content
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