“Short Stories in Japanese: New Penguin Parallel Text” edited by Michael Emmerich
Right from the introduction, editor Michael Emmerich provides his impressive knowledge about the history of Japanese literature and mentions about the “different ways of constructing sentences, different ways of representing dialogue and thought, all kinds of grammatical patterns, and lots of vocabulary.”
He then proceeded to present us with his selection of Japanese short stories to illustrate these points, 8 stories to be exact, written by some of the best in Japanese literature that encapsulate the unorthodox writing styles. The authors are: Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Masayo Koike, Yūko Tsushima, Hiromo Kawakami, Kazushige Abe, Shinji Ishii, and Sueko Yoshida.
As Emmerich remarks, “[a] trip to the gym affects more than just particular muscles, of course: it makes you feel good all over. It makes your whole body work. And that’s what this book tries to do as well.” “In fact,” Emmerich continues, “I would go so far as to say that the main point of this volume is to help you build up your overall health, strength, and endurance as an English-speaking student of Japanese or a Japanese-speaking student of English.”
This is shown by the organization of the book, where it is written in two languages, English on the left side and Japanese on the right side, which could indeed be very handy for those English-speaker who want to learn Japanese, and vice versa.
Emmerich then elaborates, “[b]y the time you arrive at the end of this collection, you will undoubtedly have picked up lots of new words and grammar, but more important, you will have had the opportunity to practice getting along on your own as a reader, without relying on detailed notes, simply using the translations to figure out why the original means what it does, and how it means it, or vice versa.”
Now I’m not planning to learn Japanese Kanji letters anytime soon, but the English side of the book is enough to teach me one or two things about Japanese literature, not to mention plenty of fresh new writing styles.
And in the end of the day I came for the stories, and these 8 stories by 8 authors did not disappoint one bit. Every single one of them contributed to the overall uniqueness of the book, and they show the fresh vantage points of life in the Japanese society. Especially the story of the weird creature and the war-time prostitute, not to mention the shortest story by Haruki Murakami that blew me away right from the beginning of the book. Great selection of stories, they perfectly fulfill my new obsession of Japanese literature.
THE CHAOS THEORY 