The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction
About
Ten of Japan's finest contemporary writers each contribute a short story set in Tokyo, and the city that emerges is stranger than any guidebook would suggest. A shape-shifter rampages through the train network. A woman is followed home by a ghost. A salaryman discovers his neighborhood exists in a different temporal zone. The contributors include Banana Yoshimoto, Hiromi Kawakami, and Hideo Furukawa, among others. What holds the collection together isn't a single vision of Tokyo but the collective sense that the city is too vast and too weird for any one perspective to contain. Each story maps a different Tokyo — mundane, fantastical, melancholy — and none of them cancel each other out. An anthology that reads like a subway map of the imagination — ten lines, ten destinations, one impossible city.
