Unusual Fragments: 20th Century Japanese Fiction edited by Sarah Coolidge

Composing a fuller picture of the literary era that brought us Osamu Dazai and Kōbō Abe, Unusual Fragments foregrounds stories of alienation with surprising humor and imagination.

A young storm-chaser welcomes a jaded woman into the eye of a storm. The last man of a peculiar family, implausibly tiny in stature, attends a Mozart opera with his dedicated wife. A medical student coolly observes an adolescent boy as he contorts his body into violent positions. With tension and wit, the writers of Unusual Fragments, among them Nobuko Takagi, Yoshida Tomoko, and Inagaki Taruho, trace their taboo, feminist, bizarre themes to complicate what we think of as 20th century Japanese literature. What's hiding just beneath the fiction of our perfectly ordered, happy lives? Something unusual. Something far more interesting.