Japan Stories

“A beautifully written patchwork of stories of contemporary Japan.”

“With exquisite and transformative simplicity, Joso assembles a polychromatic collage whose collective power adds up to very much more than its individual parts. That none of the individual stories are specifically inter-related does not undermine the sense of a bigger picture at play. Indeed, the pieces form a kind of doll’s house with no frontage where lit vestibules, conversations, and unfolding events are opened to the public gaze, unconnected but juxtaposed, like noises off in adjoining rooms.”

“

” [A] collection of fictional vignettes, each set in modern Japan, offers a brilliant understanding of both the nation and the lives that populate it. Joso paints her short stories in broad strokes, and that unadorned prose lets readers insatiably hurtle through them … Japan Stories far exceeds its purpose of translating Japanese culture, and instead details the breadth of the human condition in a charming, universal and accessible way.”

“Joso’s writing style is perfect to describe these themes, her sentences often repeating, mimicking the natural train of thoughts of an obsessive mind. Her ability to shapeshift into a diverse deck of characters with different communication abilities and traumas is remarkable. The language is predominantly descriptive, and some stories are quite cryptic and need several reads to come to life and solve the puzzle Joso puts in front of you. All stories present degrees of realism but from time to time they can take a magical tangent, sprinkling elements of the extraordinary in an ordinary and, at times, alienating Japanese life.”

“Anyone who has ever felt socially dislocated will find comfort in this new collection of short stories and poems, set in contemporary Japan, from novelist Jayne Joso … Japan Stories is a fascinating window into what is often considered, from a Western perspective at least, a reclusive society. At the same time, Japan does not have a monopoly on loneliness or the factors which create it. There is much here that applies elsewhere around the world.”

“Taken together, the ‘Japan Stories’ constitute a mosaic of modern Japanese life, populated by people making intricate origami or showing off to colleagues by drinking expensive sake, or believing they are David Bowie or making lovely kokeshi dolls. They are written in pellucidly clear prose and wrought like pieces of fine porcelain, unfussy in their language and measured in their telling to the point of being, well, serene.”