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The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories
By John L. Apostolou and Martin Harry Greenberg
Barricade Books | 176 pages | September 1997 | ISBN 156980124X | PDF | 11.5 mb
Amazon Link : http://www.amazon.com/Best-Japanese-Science-Fiction-Stories/dp/0942637283
The first anthology to bring to the West in English translation the work of a talented group of Japanese science fiction writers whose works represent a unique contribution--rather than traditionally dealing with the future, they deal with the past and present.
A compilation of 13 symbolic, psychologically based stories written by 10 of the most talented Japanese science fiction writers, including Shinichi Hoshi, Ryo Hanmura, and Sakyo Komatsu. "The Savage Mouth" by Komatsu is a horrific tale that describes the insane side of a man who is overly intellectual and who tries to know his unexplicable self by eating his body. "Standing Woman" by Yasutaka Tsutsui is a political/social statement involving a society in which those who speak out are punished by being slowly turned into manpillars or decorative plants. This well written, engaging science fiction collection, flooded with strange imagination and striking plots, and inspired by the fearsome uneasy future, is a book that should grab the imagination of young adult sci-fi enthusiasts.
The editors do inform the reader that the stories in the volume are quite different to most of the English-language SF, and those who are looking for hard SF are most definitely looking in the wrong direction. The stories collected, which were written between 196x and 199x, are very much at the 'speculative' end of SF, to the extent that some would argue that they do not constitute SF ('it's SF Jim, but not as we know it!). The stories are also on the short side of short SF, which does have implications. I personally would tend to shy away from a collection of such short stories, regardless of origin.
The stories themselves tend towards the contemporary, and reflective, and are about people, and the environment. They tend toward the contempletative, with the protagonist(s) in number of the stories being almost detached from what is happening (a la Ballard) - which is no mean trick when there is a massive confrontation between tyrannosauri and triceratops(es?) in the neighbourhood. A couple of stories would be more accurately described as horror stories, and several could be stories from the likes of Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected and so forth.
All in all and interesting read, and worth the purchase if nothing else just to give an extended flavour of SF in a different culture.
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