‘Ugly Demons’ by Yumiko Kurahashi, translated by Lane Dunlop

A man looks back twenty years to the summer when he was seventeen, one spent on the beach (and in bed) with his girlfriend, M. Yet what sounds like a gentle, nostalgic tale is anything but, with the narrator spinning a story of gender struggles, domination and depression. The story twists the summer, imagining dangerous headlands, dead stars spinning just round the coast, as well as the discovery of a stranger, left for dead on the beach, whose dark skin comes to represent the blackness inside the narrator’s soul. A warning: the writer’s use in this 1965 story of a ‘negro’ character, real or invented, might offend modern readers, but the overall sense of allegory and symbolism works wonderfully.

First published in translation Mississippi Review, Vol. 9, No. 1/2 1980. Included in Autumn Wind and Other Stories, Tuttle Publishing, 1994

‘The Breast’ by Yuriko Miyamoto, translated by Heather Bowen-Struyk

This 1935 story is one of the better pieces in an intriguing collection of proletarian writing, mainly for the female slant it provides on the class struggle in Japan. In a highly autobiographical tale, a woman runs a childcare centre for local workers and visits her prison-bound husband whenever possible. Meanwhile, she liaises with activists trying to organise a strike, only to see that not everyone is pulling in the same direction – yet as a woman she’s powerless to help. The breast in question is her own, that of a woman who has never had children, and she represents a whole raft of women working hard to support the men plotting for better conditions, without really being able to have their say. She must put her trust in these men, even when she suspects that not all of them are who they say they are.

Written 1935-37. Included in For Dignity, Justice, and Revolution: An Anthology of Japanese Proletarian Literature, The University of Chicago Press, 2016

‘At the Edge of the Wood’ by Masatsugu Ono, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Ono’s two-part story, focusing on a man living with his young son in a small house at the edge of a strange wood, seems to be set in that uncanny place between dream and reality. In the first part, ‘A Breast’, the son brings an old woman wearing nothing but an old dressing gown back to the house from the wood, with the father puzzled as to where she could have come from. ‘The Pastry Shop at the Edge of the Wood’ then has the man taking his son to buy a birthday cake for the boy’s unborn sister – after a reminder from a pair of dwarves who pop by for a visit… Bizarre and compelling, ‘At the Edge of the Wood’ is enhanced, like all of the Keshiki chapbooks, by its excellent cover design, with this one opting for a sombre monochrome theme.

Published in Keshiki: New Voices from Japan, Strangers Press, 2017

‘Spider Lilies’ by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Oyamada’s story is another two-part work, starting with a young woman’s formal visit to her fiancé’s home before moving on to a hospital visit years later when her husband is recovering from a car crash. Throughout the piece it’s what isn’t said that intrigues the reader, with secrets kept from family members, and the narrator, Yuki, acting as our access into this world. The two parts are connected by the titular flowers, called shibitobana in Japanese (‘dead man’s flower’), and the rumours about the plant’s qualities go nicely with the stories Yuki hears. It’s up to her, and us, to decide how much of it all is true.

‘Spider Lilies’ first published in English in 2014 in Granta 127: Japan, April 2014 and available for subscribers to read online here

‘In the Forest, Under Cherries in Full Bloom’ by Ango Sakaguchi, translated by Jay Rubin

The Oxford collection is the one I’d recommend as the go-to anthology for anyone interested in Japanese literature, and ‘In the Forest, Under Cherries in Full Bloom’ is my favourite piece. It begins with a bandit ambushing a traveller and his wife in the mountains, with the villain killing the man on seeing how beautiful the wife is. Alas, her beauty hides unspeakable cruelty, and her arrival will change the man’s life immeasurably, setting in motion a train of events leading him to the capital and beyond. Musing on natural beauty and juxtaposing it with a penchant for decapitation, Sakaguchi’s supernatural story of a man getting far more than he bargained for is one you won’t forget in a hurry (and you’ll certainly never look at cherry blossoms in the same way again!).

First published 1947. Included in The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, Oxford University Press, 2010

‘Where Europe Begins’ by Yōko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky

In a dizzying, fragmented narrative consisting of extracts from a travel journal, stories and childhood memories, a woman describes her journey across Siberia, fulfilling a lifelong dream to see Moscow. However, rather than being a simple travel diary, ‘Where Europe Begins’ blends travelogue and myth, with the narrator exploring the concept of boundaries as she approaches a Europe whose borders nobody can agree on. Moscow becomes less a city than a promise of something unattainable, a pipe dream, so it’s little wonder that as the narrator gets closer to the Russian capital, barriers appear to prevent her from ever reaching it. Apart from being a mesmerising story, ‘Where Europe Begins’ is unique among my selections in that it wasn’t actually written in Japanese, with Tawada having composed this piece in German (as some of you may have surmised from the translator’s name…).

Included in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Abridged), Columbia University Press, 2011

‘Time’ by Riichi Yokomitsu, translated by Donald Keene

My final choice comes from the second of the Donald Keene collections, long a staple of Japanese Studies courses. When a troupe of penniless actors are abandoned by their manager at an inn, the remaining eight men and four women have no choice but to flee on a rainy night, choosing to take a dangerous coastal road in the hope of throwing off pursuit. What ensues is an entertaining tale in which the narrator’s philosophical recount of the arduous journey, describing the effects of cold, hunger and exhaustion, is interrupted by fights stemming from the jealousy the men feel towards the women (each of whom has had liaisons with several of the men). Cleverly, by the end of the piece, these petty affairs are forgotten, and it’s life itself and the cruel nature of time that are the main focus, as the narrator swings between the longing for a peaceful death and a desperate desire to keep on living. 

Included in Modern Japanese Literature: From 1868 to the Present Day, Grove Press, 1956

Introduction

I love short stories, especially short stories about women, and mostly about the ways in which their bodies misbehave, or how they misbehave inside them. I love rewritten fairy tales, where the women are able to get their revenge, or speak in their own voices for once. I love female characters who don’t do as they’re told; who are a bit… strange. I love stories about women doing things they aren’t expected to do, or doing things that they – quote unquote – shouldn’t. And don’t worry, I know you weren’t expecting a male author up first, but he’s the only one, I promise. 

‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner

William Faulkner might not be the first author that comes to mind when thinking about short stories, but this is the short story that made me fall in love with short stories. Miss Emily Grierson lives (of course) in Jefferson, and is under mounting pressure to find a husband. After an engagement is called off, Miss Grierson becomes more reclusive, dismisses her staff and closes off half of her house. Her strange behaviour becomes part of the town’s fabric, and it’s only after her death that her strangeness is revealed for what it truly is.

First published in The Forum, April 1930. Collected in the Collected Stories, Vintage, 2009

‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter

When I was much too young, I had a huge, illustrated copy of Grimm’s fairy tales, and I would read them over and over, and imprint the grotesque illustrations on the insides of my eyelids. After a full month of nightmares inspired by Bluebeard, my beloved book was confiscated and hidden in the cupboard under the stairs, where I had to sneak-read it, and force myself not to be afraid. Reading Angela Carter as a teenager, all of my nightmares were rewritten by her reimagined fairy tales, and this one is my favourite. 

First published in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979. Currently available from Vintage Classics

‘Books and Roses’ by Helen Oyeyemi

The stories in Oyeyemi’s 2016 collection are all loosely linked by keys and locks and secrets. This story opens the collection with a baby found in a monastery with a key fastened around her neck. As she grows older, and becomes a heroine figure, she’s suddenly replaced by another. Another heroine, another key. It’s a great example of how short stories, in particular, don’t always go where you expect.

First published in Granta 129: Fate, November 2014, and available to subscribers to read online here. Collected in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Picador, 2016

‘Mrs Fox’ by Sarah Hall

A couple live comfortably in their nice house, in their nice lives. They’re content. Until one day, without warning, the wife turns into a fox. Her husband tries to adjust, to keep her content in their old life but her new body, until he realises the impossibility of what he is doing. A fox cannot be kept as a wife. At the end of the story, he’s resigned to her new self, understanding that he cannot understand her, that she is not his, and perhaps never was. 

First published in 2014 by Faber as a Kindle single, and collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017

‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado

A version of the folk/fairy tale/horror story (depending on who’s telling it), ‘The Green Ribbon’, Machado rewrites it here as a visceral visitation of the horror and ownership inflicted on women’s bodies. Not content with paying her surgeon more for an ‘extra stitch’ after she’s given birth, the narrator’s husband also nags at her, for years and years, until she finally gives in, and unties the thick green ribbon she wears around her neck. 

First published on Granta, 2014, and available to read online here. Collected in Her Body and Other Parties, Graywolf Press/Serpent’s Tail, 2017

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I couldn’t not include this, and I’m sure that every person who’s written A Personal Anthology has included it, but here it is again. When I first read this story, I read it as a horrifying account of the tricks your mind can play on you, especially when your mind is already somewhere vulnerable. On later reads, my attention switched to John, the narrator’s husband, and his cruelty and condescension. Paired with the Machado story, the moral here is that husbands suck, especially when you’ve just had their baby.

First published in The New England Magazine, January 1892. Widely collected and published, including as a £1 Penguin Little Black Classic. Available to read online here