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Speculative Japan
The Man Who Watched the Sea and Other Tales
A selection of outstanding works of fantasy and science fiction from Japan, published here in English for the first time to reveal new and very different slices of the Japanese imagination. Following the success of the first Speculative Japan book, Volume 2 explores the visions of best-selling authors across a range of genres, from the heart-warming fantasy of Awa Naoko to the cold, lonely outer spaces of Tani Koshu. Explore the Japanese view of speculative fiction, and discover the similarities and differences that make cross-cultural literature so satisfying.
278 pages, Paperback
First published January 31, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 13, 2019
An interesting project with a wide variety of topics. The thirteen stories selected range from space operas to weird phenomena, often dwelling in that undefinable "what if" space speculative fiction loves so much. I liked seeing the fullness of imagination reflected in this collection
For me, the stories that stood out were:
"A Gift from the Sea" by Awa Naoko, translated by Sheryl A. Hogg — this one is about a little girl who buys sakura shells from a weird woman at the market and learns that the women by the sea are not exactly who she thinks they are;
"The Big Drawer" by Oda Riku, translated by Nora Stevens Heath — about a family who is very good at learning lots of information very quickly, but how and what is their mission in life remain a mystery until the son of the family stumbles upon a dying man;
"Mountaintop Symphony" by Nakai Norio, translated by Terry Gallagher — the symphony is scrambling to get ready for a big performance, squabbles break out, the managers are running around trying to make deadlines...all seems normal, except that the score they are playing is infinite and the next movement within the symphony calls for impossible instruments and 800 players.
The other stories were mostly alright for me and only one—Q-Cruiser Basilisk—dragged on for so long that I gave up on it. The translation in each seemed really great as well. Nothing really stuck out as strange or out-of-place.
A couple of stories I was disappointed with because they had great concepts (ex. a world within a black hole where the singularity distorts time and space in several villages) but they defaulted into a common, problematic trope. The trope being that the story is told by some dude (young or old but always self-assured) who is reflecting on an "extraordinary" experience in his life. The story goes that he met a strange, whimsical woman with whom he instantly fell in love with and who serves as the conduit for telling the reader not only about how beautiful the man finds her and how he struggles to get her attention but also about the speculative event that the story should actually be about. I was so annoyed reading these kinds of stories! It's unnecessary and also feels like a cop-out for writers. The fact that a teenage boy is obsessed with a beautiful stranger is uninteresting—if anything, it takes away from the original speculative ideas instead of adding any sort of relatability to them. And frankly, it totally dismisses the female character. She usually has no voice except to intrigue or beguile the man telling the story. And she usually disappears or dies so that the man can go through a transformative experience of self-discovery and then tell us about it later. *eye roll* In the story mentioned above, the girl is literally caught in an eternal death, stretching across the horizon as she drifts into the singularity. And the man? Oh well, he grows old, watches her die every day and tells some kid about it who thinks the old man is eccentric. Sorry, that's not romantic. That's horrifying. I'm so tired of speculative stories like this. Come on, guys, you can do better. But anyway, I can see why the editors might have chosen these—I just wish they were better written.
The biggest disappointment though (one that bumped this down from 4.5 stars to 3, if not lower) is the production of this anthology. Besides one or two typos, which I will forgive with effort, there were some really questionable choices made. For example, take a look at the cover. I didn't notice it when I ordered it, but as soon as I had the book in my hands I couldn't unsee it. Love the image and the bright lettering and the Japanese characters up to BUT the woman in the picture is clearly WHITE (even blond). What....How is this even a thing? For a project dedicated to introducing the work of little-known Japanese writers to the English-speaking world, this is not acceptable. For a speculative fiction work, this is especially not acceptable. Surely, our imaginations are better than that. There is enough whitewashing out there—to see it on a project that tries to bridge cultural barriers is just a slap in the face.
The artist of the picture, by the way, and the designer are not credited anywhere in the book. Even if the artist and the designer were the listed editors of the collection, they should be credited for work outside of editing the book. This just makes the book seem unfinished and makes it seem like Kurodahan doesn't actually care about the talent it's trying to support.
And my last bone to pick—on par with my annoyance with the cover choice—is with the contributors' section. I LOVE that they gave space to the translators. That's really important. BUT. THERE ARE NO BIOS FOR THE JAPANESE AUTHORS. Are you kidding me?
This is incredibly problematic because: 1) these are the stories THEY wrote and we should know who the writers are, it's disrespectful to writers; 2) these stories are translated by Western people and not including information about the Japanese people who created them makes it seem like you can enjoy their content but their identities are not actually important, that's just another form of Othering; 3) purely from a reader's enjoyment perspective—if I liked a story, I have no context for it, can't find out more about the person behind it, but I sure have plenty about the person who translated it, which is not as satisfying.
Of course, I'm inclined to believe that the editors and Kurodahan didn't actually MEAN for the book to be problematic. But, it just shows that this project wasn't well thought-out. I sincerely hope the next several volumes fix these problems, but I'll be cautious about picking up the next book from them. I'm not sure the publisher even saw this as something to fix.
If you've read volumes 3 & 4, let me know what you thought!
So what was a great idea, wasn't executed in the best way and I hope more of this kind of work is done in the future but in a less thoughtless way. It's a shame, because a lot of the stories were great.
For me, the stories that stood out were:
"A Gift from the Sea" by Awa Naoko, translated by Sheryl A. Hogg — this one is about a little girl who buys sakura shells from a weird woman at the market and learns that the women by the sea are not exactly who she thinks they are;
"The Big Drawer" by Oda Riku, translated by Nora Stevens Heath — about a family who is very good at learning lots of information very quickly, but how and what is their mission in life remain a mystery until the son of the family stumbles upon a dying man;
"Mountaintop Symphony" by Nakai Norio, translated by Terry Gallagher — the symphony is scrambling to get ready for a big performance, squabbles break out, the managers are running around trying to make deadlines...all seems normal, except that the score they are playing is infinite and the next movement within the symphony calls for impossible instruments and 800 players.
The other stories were mostly alright for me and only one—Q-Cruiser Basilisk—dragged on for so long that I gave up on it. The translation in each seemed really great as well. Nothing really stuck out as strange or out-of-place.
A couple of stories I was disappointed with because they had great concepts (ex. a world within a black hole where the singularity distorts time and space in several villages) but they defaulted into a common, problematic trope. The trope being that the story is told by some dude (young or old but always self-assured) who is reflecting on an "extraordinary" experience in his life. The story goes that he met a strange, whimsical woman with whom he instantly fell in love with and who serves as the conduit for telling the reader not only about how beautiful the man finds her and how he struggles to get her attention but also about the speculative event that the story should actually be about. I was so annoyed reading these kinds of stories! It's unnecessary and also feels like a cop-out for writers. The fact that a teenage boy is obsessed with a beautiful stranger is uninteresting—if anything, it takes away from the original speculative ideas instead of adding any sort of relatability to them. And frankly, it totally dismisses the female character. She usually has no voice except to intrigue or beguile the man telling the story. And she usually disappears or dies so that the man can go through a transformative experience of self-discovery and then tell us about it later. *eye roll* In the story mentioned above, the girl is literally caught in an eternal death, stretching across the horizon as she drifts into the singularity. And the man? Oh well, he grows old, watches her die every day and tells some kid about it who thinks the old man is eccentric. Sorry, that's not romantic. That's horrifying. I'm so tired of speculative stories like this. Come on, guys, you can do better. But anyway, I can see why the editors might have chosen these—I just wish they were better written.
The biggest disappointment though (one that bumped this down from 4.5 stars to 3, if not lower) is the production of this anthology. Besides one or two typos, which I will forgive with effort, there were some really questionable choices made. For example, take a look at the cover. I didn't notice it when I ordered it, but as soon as I had the book in my hands I couldn't unsee it. Love the image and the bright lettering and the Japanese characters up to BUT the woman in the picture is clearly WHITE (even blond). What....How is this even a thing? For a project dedicated to introducing the work of little-known Japanese writers to the English-speaking world, this is not acceptable. For a speculative fiction work, this is especially not acceptable. Surely, our imaginations are better than that. There is enough whitewashing out there—to see it on a project that tries to bridge cultural barriers is just a slap in the face.
The artist of the picture, by the way, and the designer are not credited anywhere in the book. Even if the artist and the designer were the listed editors of the collection, they should be credited for work outside of editing the book. This just makes the book seem unfinished and makes it seem like Kurodahan doesn't actually care about the talent it's trying to support.
And my last bone to pick—on par with my annoyance with the cover choice—is with the contributors' section. I LOVE that they gave space to the translators. That's really important. BUT. THERE ARE NO BIOS FOR THE JAPANESE AUTHORS. Are you kidding me?
This is incredibly problematic because: 1) these are the stories THEY wrote and we should know who the writers are, it's disrespectful to writers; 2) these stories are translated by Western people and not including information about the Japanese people who created them makes it seem like you can enjoy their content but their identities are not actually important, that's just another form of Othering; 3) purely from a reader's enjoyment perspective—if I liked a story, I have no context for it, can't find out more about the person behind it, but I sure have plenty about the person who translated it, which is not as satisfying.
Of course, I'm inclined to believe that the editors and Kurodahan didn't actually MEAN for the book to be problematic. But, it just shows that this project wasn't well thought-out. I sincerely hope the next several volumes fix these problems, but I'll be cautious about picking up the next book from them. I'm not sure the publisher even saw this as something to fix.
If you've read volumes 3 & 4, let me know what you thought!
So what was a great idea, wasn't executed in the best way and I hope more of this kind of work is done in the future but in a less thoughtless way. It's a shame, because a lot of the stories were great.
May 28, 2016
See my review at The Literary Sisters.
Fantasy fiction is one of my very favourite genres to read since I grew up with it, and I’ve been trying to find some Japanese fantasy for the longest time. However, my search had been mostly fruitless until I stumbled upon a fellow blogger’s review of the “Speculative Japan” series of fantasy and science fiction short stories. Needless to say I was more than happy to finally acquire a volume for myself.
This second volume consists of 13 short stories by a different author each. Even though all of the stories fall under the category of fantasy or sci-fi, they are so diverse and they handle their themes in such a different yet interesting manner.
In the Introduction of the book, Darrell Schweitzer accurately observes that most people expect samurais, geishas, kimonos and “a ritual suicide or three” whenever they think of inherently Japanese elements and while I do agree with this remark, I also felt like those stories couldn’t be more Japanese, even though most of those elements which first come to one’s mind were absent.
Whilst fantasy and science fiction do not seem to be very popular in Japanese fiction (at least when translated into English), they dominate the anime/manga and video game world, which I believe makes such an interesting contradiction. For instance, Kitakuni Koji’s “Midst the Mist”, a story revolving around a specific breed of aliens that lived inside human bodies as parasites, strongly reminded me of the anime/manga series “Parasyte”.
Most of the stories contained in this collection were focused mostly on sci-fi rather than fantasy, but it was still great to read them as they offered a very fresh perspective and approach on the themes they chose to follow compared to the sci-fi stories that I have read so far, which are mainly American. Moreover, some of the stories such as Tani Koshu’s “Q-Cruiser Basilisk”, a space story about ghost ships, and Ogawa Issui’s “Old Vohl’s Planet”, a story about the evolution of (alien) species, contained quite a few scientific terms and it was evident that the authors had conducted a very thorough research before writing anything down. I can only imagine how challenging the translation of these stories might have been!
Of course, in short story collections it is very rare for all the stories to equally be of one’s liking, and therefore there were some stories I didn’t enjoy as much as the others. “Freud” by Enjoe Toh was one of them, which I found rather uninteresting. On the other hand, some of my favourites were “The Whale That Sang On The Milky Nework” by Ohara Mariko, “Emanon: A Reminiscence” by Kajio Shinji and “The Man Who Watched The Sea” by Kobayashi Yasumi, which was also featured in the title of the collection.
The translations were also all very good and they had a very natural flow. Even though I read Japanese literature often, I wasn’t familiar with any of the authors featured in this collection, so I was very happy to discover some new authors whose work I would very much like to follow. It would have been nice, though, if some information about the authors were also included in the collection.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading these short stories and I definitely discovered some gems in there. It was very well put together and I will definitely seek out the rest of the series’ volumes in the future.
Fantasy fiction is one of my very favourite genres to read since I grew up with it, and I’ve been trying to find some Japanese fantasy for the longest time. However, my search had been mostly fruitless until I stumbled upon a fellow blogger’s review of the “Speculative Japan” series of fantasy and science fiction short stories. Needless to say I was more than happy to finally acquire a volume for myself.
This second volume consists of 13 short stories by a different author each. Even though all of the stories fall under the category of fantasy or sci-fi, they are so diverse and they handle their themes in such a different yet interesting manner.
In the Introduction of the book, Darrell Schweitzer accurately observes that most people expect samurais, geishas, kimonos and “a ritual suicide or three” whenever they think of inherently Japanese elements and while I do agree with this remark, I also felt like those stories couldn’t be more Japanese, even though most of those elements which first come to one’s mind were absent.
Whilst fantasy and science fiction do not seem to be very popular in Japanese fiction (at least when translated into English), they dominate the anime/manga and video game world, which I believe makes such an interesting contradiction. For instance, Kitakuni Koji’s “Midst the Mist”, a story revolving around a specific breed of aliens that lived inside human bodies as parasites, strongly reminded me of the anime/manga series “Parasyte”.
Most of the stories contained in this collection were focused mostly on sci-fi rather than fantasy, but it was still great to read them as they offered a very fresh perspective and approach on the themes they chose to follow compared to the sci-fi stories that I have read so far, which are mainly American. Moreover, some of the stories such as Tani Koshu’s “Q-Cruiser Basilisk”, a space story about ghost ships, and Ogawa Issui’s “Old Vohl’s Planet”, a story about the evolution of (alien) species, contained quite a few scientific terms and it was evident that the authors had conducted a very thorough research before writing anything down. I can only imagine how challenging the translation of these stories might have been!
Of course, in short story collections it is very rare for all the stories to equally be of one’s liking, and therefore there were some stories I didn’t enjoy as much as the others. “Freud” by Enjoe Toh was one of them, which I found rather uninteresting. On the other hand, some of my favourites were “The Whale That Sang On The Milky Nework” by Ohara Mariko, “Emanon: A Reminiscence” by Kajio Shinji and “The Man Who Watched The Sea” by Kobayashi Yasumi, which was also featured in the title of the collection.
The translations were also all very good and they had a very natural flow. Even though I read Japanese literature often, I wasn’t familiar with any of the authors featured in this collection, so I was very happy to discover some new authors whose work I would very much like to follow. It would have been nice, though, if some information about the authors were also included in the collection.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading these short stories and I definitely discovered some gems in there. It was very well put together and I will definitely seek out the rest of the series’ volumes in the future.
August 26, 2014
I loved this anthology. There were perhaps two stories I did not enjoy. I will be reading this again.
June 23, 2024
I apparently listened to both 1 and 2 in a single file 🤷
Of course, with anthologies like this, mileage will wary between stories.
Some of these where utterly fucked up in a very Japanese way, others indistinguishable from "Western" sci-fi.
Some were absolute genius and others were tedious.
Some were entirely new ideas, some were old ideas with a distinctly Japanese spin.
I'm giving them five stars, because I think everyone reading science fiction could benefit from reading these two books.
The commentaries were also very interesting.
Of course, with anthologies like this, mileage will wary between stories.
Some of these where utterly fucked up in a very Japanese way, others indistinguishable from "Western" sci-fi.
Some were absolute genius and others were tedious.
Some were entirely new ideas, some were old ideas with a distinctly Japanese spin.
I'm giving them five stars, because I think everyone reading science fiction could benefit from reading these two books.
The commentaries were also very interesting.
January 4, 2025
I think I liked this more than Volume 1.
Favorites:
"Old Vohl's Planet" by Issui Ogawa
"Emanon: A Reminiscence" by Kajio Shinji
"Midst the Mist" by Kitakuni Koji
"The Old Man Who Watched the Sea" by Kobayashi Yasumi
Favorites:
"Old Vohl's Planet" by Issui Ogawa
"Emanon: A Reminiscence" by Kajio Shinji
"Midst the Mist" by Kitakuni Koji
"The Old Man Who Watched the Sea" by Kobayashi Yasumi
June 16, 2011
This is a good mixture of authors from major award winning authors to lesser known writers.The stories here, some are straight sci-fi,the majority are more explorative in nature, Takagi Nobuko's for instance follows a woman on a visit to Europe and encounters a man with a riddle in his past,in a theological themed story. Another 'Mountaintop Symphony' follows an orchestra about to embark on playing a segment in a symphony so long that no one alive can remember it's beginning, and no one alive will hear it's ending, a metaphorical story that also offers a psychological glimpse into the players.I think this book is printed on demand,but well worth seeking out a copy.
July 15, 2015
An odd assortment at the first glance - but in the end, the incredible diversity becomes this collection's forte. And there's one thing all the stories have in common: clever, bold originality.
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