UNMAPPED TERRITORIES: New Women’s Fiction From Japan,...

UNMAPPED TERRITORIES: New Women’s Fiction From Japan, edited by Yukiko Tanaka (Women in Translation: $10.95) and JAPANESE WOMEN WRITERS: Twentieth Century Short Fiction, translated and edited by Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko Iriye Selden (East Gate/M. E. Sharpe: $14.95). These two complementary anthologies of short stories document the growing importance of female authors in modern Japanese fiction. The material in “Unmapped Territories” is more approachable for Westerners, and reflects the conflicts between tradition and modernization in postwar Japan. Noriko, the main character in “Sinking Ground” by Mizuko Masuda, represents a new phenomenon: the single working woman who lives alone and enjoys her independence. Impatient and uncertain, she upbraids an attractive new man in her office who refuses to fix his own tea--a situation that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. A similar resentment against traditional, subservient roles permeates the stories involving ghosts and spirits. The narrator of Minako Ohba’s “Candle Fish” dreams that she becomes a yamanba, a mountain witch who devours hapless male travelers, beginning with their genitals; a similarly predatory impulse drives the middle-aged heroine, who takes an almost professional pride in seducing younger men in Taeko Tomioka’s “Straw Dogs.” The stories from the early part of the century collected by Lippit and Selden seem less interesting, as many of these authors used their fiction as a vehicle for a liberal and/or Marxist socio-political agenda. In “Residues of Squalor” by Ota Yoko, a group of women battle a loathsome invasion of slugs, while the ants that attack a chunk of raw meat serve as metaphor for the vicious passions of the sado-masochistic narrator of Kono Taeko’s grisly “Ants Swarm.”