A Predilection for Pop Culture

...We'll be watching over you.' We station ourselves beside the sleeping man, our ears cocked, that we might discern that grand epic single utterance of his...

...The editor defends his selections by emphasizing the changes his authors have experienced: "The Japanese life-style they know has as much to do with jeans and hamburgers as tatami mats and miso soup...

...The works fit a sociological agenda more than a literary one...

...Cats can't read.'" Unlike "Swallowtails," most of the pieces in New Japanese Voices are inconsistent and utterly opaque-with Genichiro Takahashi and the ubiquitous Haruki Murakami again the chief culprits...

...At the entrance was a huge sign, almost as if the city fathers had erected it as a warning to the residents...

...In "The Imitation of Leibniz," translated by Minora Mochizuki, a professional baseball player meditates on his long season-opening slump...

...All he offers is inorganic intellectual scrap...

...He is relaxing at home on a Sunday afternoon when three TV People arrive toting a Sony television that shows only static...

...Lacking emotion, depth and personality, his characters are usually uninvolved in uninteresting situations and leave the reader painfully aware of a writer simply trying to be clever...

...If the primary purpose of these anthologies is to promote the fact that Japan is today every bit as saturated with pop culture as the West, then they certainly have succeeded...

...And Masato Takeno's "Yamada Diary,'' about a teenager who plays a mundane computer game closely resembling his own mundane daily routine, provides a vivid glimpse into Japan's immense and complex computer hacker subculture...

...A rumor circulating among the Japanese literati hadit that Mitsios, who does not read Japanese, shunned local advice on the possible makeup of her collection...

...Sleep well, William Shakespeare...

...here it is egregious...

...Although I happen to like the genre, this story drowns in its own white noise...

...Consider the following from "Christopher Columbus Discovers America," by Takahashi, described by Birnbaum as the " enfant terrible of 'metafiction'": "At last, the fated hour hath arrived...

...He seemed to be thinking about something...

...I assume the TV People metaphorically represent his drift toward a dissolved marriage and insanity, for after his wife fails to return home one day, it is one of them who tells him, "It's gone too far: She's out there...

...Reviewed by Karl Taro Greenfeld Former book and film critic, "Asahi Evening News" "KITCH AND HYPE are everywhere on the page," editor Alfred Birnbaum brashly proclaims in his Introduction to Monkey Brain Sushi...

...Still, New Japanese Voices boasts the best story of the lot, "Swallowtails" by Shiina Makoto...

...It says that dogs and cats are not allowed in this park.' " 'Oh,' he said...

...Here is a typical wild pitch of a translation: "I had a lucky hit, a grounder which made an irregular bound, and a two-base hit which was caused by a center fielder who made an error in judging the way the ball was going...

...New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan Helen Mitsios, editor Atlantic Monthly Press...

...From the choices they have made, one must conclude that they consider it important for us to view the Japanese as capable of eating hamburgers, not of writing quality fuikkushon...

...Besides Murakami, she repeats three other authors-Shimada, Takahashi and Yamada...

...Such babble makes Flaubert's Parrot seem like a Hemingway hunt...

...Take, for example, the self-conscious, postmodern, minimalist stylings of Haruki Murakami, a newly discovered darling of Western critics who is represented in both books...

...Soon they appear at his office, where his co-workers cannot see them either...

...You're right,' I said with a laugh...

...Poor plotting and cheap gimmicks are hallmarks of the fuikkushon (fiction) in both collections...

...175 pp...

...Grounders take bad hops, as we all know, and center fielders misjudge fly balls...

...Most of the time dogs are taken for walks on a leash, so the owners, at least, will see this sign...

...I have read "Christopher Columbus" twice and still do not understand it...

...That was apparent in his first novel, A Wild Sheep Chase...

...Plot has never been his strong point, though...

...gone are the conflicts between traditional and contemporary values...

...The visitors look like ordinary people, except that they happen to be 20 per cent smaller than normal and are not visible to the hero's wife...

...Whatever her criteria, her choices are not much better than Birnbaum's...

...This tale of a misunderstood, rambunctious, slow-learning first grader and his caring father is lovingly told and filled with genuine emotion...

...Noticeably absent is any mourning for lost innocence...

...The protagonist of Murakami's "TV People" in Monkey Brain Sushi is an electronics executive...

...Thus "Sproing," by Eri Makino, does introduce an original voice, artfully translated by Mona Tellier...

...And there are contemporary writers like Taeko Hirabuyashi, Kenji Nakagami and Taeko Kono whose work is no less culturally relevant for exploring the deeper themes of modern Japanese life: the very conflict between old and new that Birnbaum decries...

...their romancing and nuclear-couple apartment living likewise only tenuously resemble the arranged marriages and extended households that were the mainstay of the highly involved family saga...

...NO CATS OR DOGS ALLOWED, it read, in big red and black letters...

...But it is the device that has gone too far, lending an ersatz semiotic coating to an otherwise typical tale of a family crackup...

...Changes notwithstanding, ignoring tatami mats and miso soup can have devastating repercussions...

...If Japanese writers are going to focus on Western pop imagery exclusively, they risk not only being derivative but abnegating their literary legacy...

...Time to hear out the root of misery...

...Unfortunately, also noticeably absent from the selections in these two anthologies are the tension and energy characteristic of first-rate literature...

...What does it say?' Takashi asked me...

...Even its lamentably few triumphs come not in whole stories but in the odd sections that do not give the impression of being an economics textbook whose pages have been shuffled...

...Butthat'sstrange,' he said after a while...

...Apparently this does not trouble Alfred Birnbaum and Helen Mitsios, however...

...Murakami's use of the TV People is as heavy-handed as Nightmare on Elm Street's ploy of playing with dream versus reality whenever the plot needs a shove...

...Moreover, most of the writers in Monkey Brain Sushi- who include Genichiro Takahashi, Kyoji Kobayashi, Masahiko Shimada and Mariko Ohara-are hardly helped by their translators...

...Why?' " 'Because dogs and cats can't read!' "But of course...

...The passage comes near the end of a story that begins promisingly enough- before proceeding to go down the metafictional toilet-with a scene of children in a kindergarten class discussing what they want to be when they grow up...

...Monkey Brain Sushi keeps gunning, pseudointellectual shot after pseudo-intellectual shot, yet rarely gets anywhere near the target of readability...

...Sleep well, Hanshin Tiger...

...Japan has a wonderful living literary tradition, perhaps one of the oldest and longest prose histories in the world...

...Nevertheless, I must sympathize with Takahashi for being especially badly served by his translators and editors...

...But, oh, how great the price-and I am not merely talking about good reading...

...Just as Birnbaum, who doubles as Murakami's translator, is unable to distinguish plot from device and is willing to settle for smoke and mirrors in lieu of reason and reality, Helen Mitsios, the editor of New Japanese Voices, suffers from her own frailties...

...It is the only story in either book that allows itself to hint at real feeling: "I went with Takashi one day to see a part of the new park that had been opened...

...Cats, however, usually come and go as they please...

...Indeed, the short stories and novella excerpts seem to have been chosen not because they were the best that young Japanese writers are now producing, but because they best convey the sense that their authors are hip to some greasy spiritus mundi of junk food and MTV...