Author: Jonathan Gibbs

‘I Am a Novelist’ by Murakami Ryū, translated by Ralph McCarthy

Murakami Ryū is so compelling. This has an amazing premise, too – a writer gets a call from a hostess club where someone has been impersonating him, running up a massive drinks tab, and having an affair with one of the hostesses at the club.

First published in Japanese in the collection Run, Takahashi! in 1986.. Collected in Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories, Kurodahan Press 2016. I cannot find a version of this online, but apparently it’s available to subscribers of The New Yorker through online archives… I think…

‘The Second Bakery Attack’ by Murakami Haruki, translated by Jay Rubin

It was literally impossible to pick one short story from Murakami Haruki. I thought about picking just 12 from him alone. Thinking about it, I should’ve picked ‘Silence’. But I didn’t. Whoops.

First published in Japanese 1986. Included in The Elephant Vanishes, Vintage 2003. Available to read online here

‘A Clean Marriage’ by Murata Sayaka, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

You might know her from Convenience Store Woman, but this was my first exposure to Murata Sayaka. An asexual man and woman get together with the understanding that there will be no sex in this marriage, thank you very much.

First published as part of the collection Satsujin shussan, Kodansha 2014. First published in English in Granta 127: Japan in 2014, and available to read online here

‘Enoki’ by Matsuda Aoko, translated by Polly Barton

I love Matsuda Aoko’s writing. I wanted to choose The Girl Who Is Getting Married (part of the Keshiki series of chapbooks from Strangers Press), but I thought I’d pick something people can read online instead.

First published in Japanese in 2018. Included in Where the Wild Ladies Are, Tilted Axis 2020. Available to read online here

‘The Magic Chalk’ by Abe Kōbō, translated by Alison Kibrick

I read this story years and years ago when I first lived in Japan. I haven’t re-read it since, but I remember it blew my socks off. A guy finds a piece of magic chalk and draws a door to another universe on his apartment wall. A bit like that cartoon Penny Crayon.

First published in Japanese 1950. Collected in The Shōwa Anthology: Modern Japanese Short Stories, Kodansha 1992. Available to read online here

‘Come Out’ by Hoshi Shin’ichi, translated by Stanleigh Jones

Hoshi Shin’ichi is awesome. I feel like he deserves to be translated into English more than he currently is. He writes these great Sci-Fi short, short stories. This one is a sort of morality tale about the environment (and an increasingly relevant one).

First published in Japanese 1957 and available in the collection Bokko-chan in Japanese. Available here and there online: On someone’s blog here or there’s a weird scanned version here

‘The Bridegroom Was a Dog’ by Tawada Yōko, translated by Margaret Misutani

In Japanese literature, you often get these long short stories which are part of a mini-collection. This is one of those. I remember really enjoying this story when I read it ­– I remember it being narrated by the town, following the exploits of one woman who lives there.

Included in The Bridegroom Was a Dog, New Directions 2012 or Kodansha 1998

‘The House of the Sleeping Beauties’ by Kawabata Yasunari, translated by Edward Seidensticker

Similar to ‘The Bridegroom Was a Dog’ mentioned above, this is also a long short story available in a mini-collection form. But this is just about the creepiest, weirdest story I’ve ever read. An older man pays to sleep next to a young woman at a weird brothel-esque house for narcoleptics.

First published in Japanese 1961. Included in The House of Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, Vintage International 2017

Introduction (a lockdown Personal Anthology)

I’ve long wanted to submit my own Personal Anthology but, as I hope previous contributors have found, where to begin? Where to end? How to choose twelve stories that highlight the best of what short fiction can be? 
 
At the moment I’m in lockdown away from home: safe, comfortable, but separated from my own and personal library. Knowing this might be the case for a while, I took a small selection of books with me, mostly ones I had yet to read, but one or two I didn’t want to be without or else because the urge to read them simply struck me. I’ve since added to this selection, resisting the temptation to buy books I already own but which happened to not be to hand… It may not be the Personal Anthology I might have written, but it’s the one I’ve got.
 
Of course, the internet abounds with good fiction and perhaps an alternative anthology could be made of the best of an online library, but I liked the Oulipian approach outlined above. Some of the stories discussed here were new to me, but they all – I think, hope – have something to recommend them, both in and of themselves, but also the rest of their authors’ works, something I’ve found the best Personal Anthologies have always done.

‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges

This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility.
Dr. Stephen Albert 

Every other Personal Anthology seems to include a Borges story, which suits me because as far as I’m concerned, he redefined what short fiction could be and transcended that same definition. I could choose any one of his stories and be happy, but I’ve gone with ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ because, as far as I can remember, it was the first Borges story I ever read.

It contains his usual preoccupations: philosophy, time, labyrinths, but it also manages to be a spy thriller, almost cinematic in parts, and makes me wonder if anyone might be brave enough to adapt it in some way. Borges’ stories have everything. They contain, not multitudes, but infinities. 

First published in English in Fictions, 1962. Now available in Fictions and Labyrinths, Penguin Classics, 1999

‘Seven Floors’ by Dino Buzzati

I think I’d read Buzzati before – I vaguely remember ‘The Falling Girl’ – but it didn’t ‘click’ just then. Probably I wasn’t listening carefully enough. Regardless, I heard the click this time. ‘Seven Floors’ is a Kafkaesque tale (but more deserving of that epithet; Buzzati has a style all his own) about Giuseppe Corte, a mildly feverish man admitted to the highest floor of a sanatorium where he is told his stay will be brief, the lower floors being reserved for the progressively worse.
 
Corte observes the ground floor with a gloomy fear. Certain circumstances prevail and he is required – only temporarily, he is assured – to be moved to the sixth floor, to the fifth, to the fourth…, the doctors soothing his anxieties each time. That the reader can see what will happen long before Corte does is partly what makes the story. He ends up, inevitably, consigned to a darkened ground floor room. There could be no other ending.
 
(As a side note, there is another story in this collection about an influenza virus contracted by people who are disloyal to the government, but perhaps that’s a bit too close to the bone for these times.)

From Catastrophe and Other Stories, Alma Press 2018