Books like Monkey Brain Sushi: New Tastes in Japanese Fiction

Alfred Birnbaum's introduction to this book downplays the fiction in this volume as neither serious literature nor pulpy trash; rather, he tells us it finds its stride in the middle of the road. The stories are artfully displayed, hence the sushi, and bounce frenetically between a variety of subjects, much like the unmindful "monkey brain" of Buddhism. To put less metaphorically, these stories are enjoyable, possibly escapist realities.This really downplays the content of this anthology. There is a lot of serious literature to contemplate here. There is forbidden love, symbolic parody, and satire, just to name a few examples.Even when the stories seem boring, they end up attacking the reader's palate with a thick piece of gristle, as in Osamu Hashimoto's Peony Snowflakes of Love in which a housewife leaves her husband and daughter for a female truck driver. You can see where the story is headed based upon the first interaction of the two women, and the detailed description of the bored housewife who is chronically unappreciated by her family. What you don't see coming is the violent familial interaction that serves as the catalyst to her abandonment, jarring you out of a haze of tedium.The same goes for Amy Yamada's Kneel Down and Lick My Feet, in which an S&M queen relays to the reader her daily interactions with men desperate for under-the-counter love. Nothing here is shocking in the age of Fifty Shades of Grey (though I'm sure for 1988, the year of publication, it was) and I found myself drifting away during the description of unusual sexcapades. However, when a man arrives with an unusual request denied by all but one dominant and it is described in exquisite, gag-inducing details, I was caught a bit off guard. Not so much like this:More like this:Somehow, though, Yamada makes this bit of shocksploitation relevant to the story. The man, like the women, has something to hide. It is something deep seated and relevant to his previous love, which is now completely removed from his life. Perhaps our main character's motivations are deep seated too, but I’ll never know, which brings me to a major qualm about this book. Quite a few of the stories are novel excerpts.This is a common complaint in other reviews, but I do not mind novel excerpts. Many argue it destroys the integrity of a work, but it certainly does not. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books destroy a work’s integrity. Audio abridgements destroy a work’s integrity. An excerpt does not. An excerpt drives the reader to seek out the rest of the work, which I did, only to find that the rest of Kneel Down and Lick My Feet is unavailable in English.Nor is this the only excerpt where the rest of the text is only available in Japanese. Kyoji Kobayashi’s Mazelife is the second half of an untranslated novella. In fact, the “maze” referred to in the title is largely the focus of the first half of the novella, so without access to this, you’re left with an intriguing work about a rule-obsessed man seeking to hide from emotion and create his own god. Fascinating plot, no? Too bad you’ll never finish the story if you do not speak Japanese.Overall, though, each of these short stories is well-worth a read, even if you sometimes might not know what the hell the author bios are trying to convey. Here is an excerpt from Osamu Hashimoto’s:“Japanese reader’s of Peony Snowflakes of Love would immediately recognize this story as a sexual inversion on the classic Toei truckdriver-genre films scenario.>”How’s that for esoteric? Luckily, it doesn’t impede the emotional resonance of the story.There’s a wonderful satire piece by Yoshinori Shimizu entitled Japanese Entrance Exams for Earnest Young Men which skewers standardized testing. The work might have been published in 1988, but it is more-than-relevant to American public schools. I started having flashbacks to my days as an Exam Preparation Coordinator where I taught students how to take tests, not how to advance or appreciate their knowledge. Check out this gem of a paragraph:“Ichiro loved to study now. He even came to like Japanese, which he had hated so much before. When he saw through the traps that the test writers had set for him and sidestepped them with ease, he felt the same exhilaration he felt when he dodged and outran a pursuer on the soccer field.” (253)This is easily one of the best stories in the book.There is even a manga by Michio Hisauchi called Japan’s Junglest Day that is based on the true story of soldiers discovered on a remote island in the 1970’s who still believed WWII raged. The manga involves a philosophical discussion of misery moderated by a giant, talking mess kit and a space alien dedicated to collecting money for needy children on his home planet.Okay, so a few story elements might not have actually happened.There is something in each of these stories to love, and quite a few things that disgust, but everything it has to offer is highly thought-provoking (and not in a faux, attempting depth kind of way) and entertaining.