| NOTA |
(★)(1.Irreverent, post-Zen, bizarre, the stories in this remarkable collection of Japanese fiction chart new literary and cultural territory. In style and substance --as the title of the collection would suggest-- this is something quite different from what the West has come to expect of the Japanese palate. The writers showcased here represent the brightest and the boldest of a new generation. Born after the war, coming of age in the booming eighties, they startle us with their range of emotion, energy, and experience. Among the offerings : ◆Little clones, in a fable by Haruki Murakami [author of the acclaimed ´A Wild Sheep Chase´], march around in a TV twilight zone, voiding a marriage while building an airplane that looks like a juicer. ◆Elvis [yes, Elvis], in Eri Makino´s story, reaches out from a videotape to touch the life of an ordinary housewife, liberating her from drudgery, husband, and mother-in-law. ◆The search for God, in an earnest tale by Kyoji Kobayashi, turns up a minotaur that bellows : Eat mooore! Drink mooore! Have mooore sex! ◆Soldiers stranded from the war on a south sea island, in Michio Hisauchi´s manga masterpiece, discuss the physics of misery with a spaceman from Spiral Nebula NGC4592. ◆The tough dirty talk of S&M, in Amy Yamada´s romance, yields to a sublime tenderness. Selected and edited by Alfred Birnbaum [translator of A Wild Sheep Chase], these stories are a special treat --daring, kitschy, rude, delightful. This is, after all, Monkey Brain Sushi! ◆Alfred Birnbaum, an American born in 1957, lives in Myanmar when he is not traveling elsewhere. He has spent many years in Japan since childhood, and has been actively involved in the visual and performing arts there. He is also one of the leading translators of contemporary Japanese fiction, with three major novels by Haruki Murakami, and the award-winning ´A Burden of Flowers´ by Natsuki Ikezawa, amomg his translations.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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