TOKYO STORIES
A Literary Stroll
Translated and edited by LAWRENCE ROGERS
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 267 pages, $19.95

reviewed by Ronald Suleski

Whether you are a citizen of Tokyo or feel yourself a citizen of the world, you will find that Tokyo Stories is a gem. For my money, it is the best collection of Tokyo stories yet published.

Lawrence Rogers, professor of Japanese at the University of Hawaii, has compiled and translated eighteen short stories set in Tokyo and originally published between 1925 and 1996. Thus, we are able to see Tokyo in its early modern guise, during the prewar years of the late Taisho and early Showa eras (1915 to 1940), through the hard times of postwar reconstruction (1946 to 1966), and from then on to today, where modern life impinges in all its forms. All but two of these stories appear in English for the first time, showing us that much of the vibrant world of recent Japanese fiction has yet to be revealed to the wider non-Japanese-speaking world. Rogers's love of Tokyo is clear from his forty-eight-page introduction, an informed and literate essay of observation and description which perfectly sets the mood for the stories that follow.

Takeda Rintaro's story "The Image," originally published in 1940, takes us back to prewar Tokyo, to the restaurants, bars, bathhouses, and neighborhood shrines of the old Asakusa district. A young woman is the central character of the story. She works as a waitress in an eating/drinking establishment, where her game of coquettishly joking with the male patrons is expected to segue, sooner or later, into sexual contact. She sees all about her the pursuit of sex and the importance of sexual attractiveness. At age seventeen, she, too, feels ready to participate. With the steady rains of mid-autumn and a local shrine fair as the setting, Takeda describes a later adolescent coming of age in the old city, playing adult games with grown men by seductively welcoming and then lightly rejecting them, acting impulsively and calculatingly at the same time.

Tokyo has seen hard times. Hayashi Fumiko's story "The Old Part of Town," first published in 1949, is also set in a part of the shitamachi district not far from Asakusa (which Rogers defines as the older, more plebeian section of the city), then struggling to reemerge from the destruction caused by World War II. Hiyashi died in 1951, at age forty-eight, only two years after her story appeared. It was as if the survival of the city she loved, like her own life, took too great an effort of will to accomplish. Her story describes a Tokyo filled with rubble, dirt, and lives that had become unraveled. It is a tale of daily survival in that difficult time, when even fleeting happiness was embedded in the make-do world of the immediate postwar period.

For contemporary Tokyo's most marginal citizens, the ones who sleep under cardboard near Shinjuku Station or aimlessly wait in parks, daily survival is still a struggle. A loss of structure and confidence in their lives beclouds everything about them. Ikeda Michiko, born in Kyoto in 1914, has been writing both fiction and essays about these down-and-out citizens for the past fifty years. Her story "An Unclaimed Body," published in 1977, describes the lives of the day laborers who, when they can afford to, congregate in the Sanya district's cheap hotels, with eight bunk beds to a room and minimal furnishings. Their world is intensely concrete and specific; its horizons do not attempt to move beyond the rhythms of each arriving day.

"Jacob's Tokyo Ladder," a story by Hino Keizo first published in 1996, opens with scenes of the empty sidewalks of the present-day Otemachi business district. After a varied earlier career Hino, now aged seventy-three, has been an established figure on the Japanese literary scene for the past thirty years. He describes how the solid office towers are silent in this part of town in the evening, when the windows of the banks and corporate headquarters are tightly shuttered. His narrator seems to be the only soul on the sidewalk, except for a dark figure walking ahead, a portent of the bad news the narrator receives a few days later, when doctors tell him he has cancer. In the descriptions that followdepression at the news of cancer, a hospital stay followed by recovery and resumption of life in the cityHino talks about a brisk, business-oriented Tokyo that does not cater to the fragile emotions of human beings and rarely offers a welcoming embrace. Hino's Tokyo is a thoroughly modern, vaguely disquieting metropolis.

Although Inaba Mayumi's "Morning Comes Twice a Day," first published in 1996, is wrapped securely in the specifics of Tokyo's geography, it is a story that could be set in any modern city. Born in central Japan in 1950, Inaba was a recognized writer by the time she was twenty-three and continues to win literary prizes in Japan, yet this is the first opportunity for readers to enjoy her work in English. Her fiction often describes the lives of women who decide not to marry but to quietly defy convention by living alone in the sprawling city. The heroine of this story, who works at a publishing company, must move out of her rented ramshackle wooden cottage in western Tokyo's Musashino, an area with groves of trees and scattered open fields. Since she has a cat that she will not give up, finding other accommodations is less easy then it ought to be, but totally understandable to anyone who has ever searched for an urban apartment. The heroine finally acquires a place in the Shinagawa section of southeastern Tokyo, where the feeling of the ocean being nearby is palpable and the sunrises are especially beautiful. Can a human being live in a fifth-floor, one-room condo, even if it does have a large window with a balcony and a view toward the east? More to the point, is it possible for a cat to give up its ambles through the underbrush and confine its roaming to a few hundred square feet? And what is the trade-off they agree to by doing so?

This excellent collection of short stories about Tokyo ends on just such a contemporary note, fitting for a city that so celebrates being, and so definitely lives, in the present. Rogers has indeed taken us on a literary stroll, as his subtitle promises, through one of the world's most vibrant and compelling cities.