Until a recent "boom," Shimao Toshio, writer of short fiction,
critic, and essayist, was not widely known, even in Japan. He has
never won the Akutagawa or the Naoki Prize, and none of his works
had previously appeared in English translation. He is less well
known than other writers (Yasuoka Shotaro, Kojima Nobuo, and Shono
Junzo) with whom he has associated and whose works have been
liberally translated into English. Yet, there are those who
consider him to be one of the best contemporary writers in Japan.
This volume by no means exhausts the scope of Shimao's fiction.
There are no stories here, for instance, about childhood or student
life, and none of his many travel stories. Some of his most famous
stories-"When we Never Left Port," for example-have not been
included. But the stories presented here do offer a considerable
variety of style, from the pristine storybook language of "The
Farthest Edge of the Islands," to the young intellectual's jargon
of "Everyday Life in a Dream," to the visionary, hysterical,
occasionally ritualistic prose of the "sick wife" stories, to the
sober, difficult, almost ponderous narration of "This Time That
Summer." Shimao's approach to his material varies as well.
"Everyday Life in a Dream" is the only representative here of a
large number of stories usually called surrealistic by the critics,
stories whose plots progress by the logic of dreams. The individual
experience of real life are lived through a combination of
conscious and unconscious perception. These stories are the least
approachable and the least charming to the casual reader, but they
serve, among other things, to highlight patterns in the more
realistic fiction. "The Farthest Edge of the Islands" is a symbolic
heightening of reality in another way, a romantic fairy tale
beginning at the extremity of experience, at the farthest edge of
the world. The other stories are presented as precise, close
chronicles of reality by a participant in that reality whose
attention never waivers and who never allows himself to avert his
eyes from a world that he sees as his responsibility and in a sense
his fault. All but the first story, "The Farthest Edge of the
Islands," which is in third-person narration, are told in the first
person by the character who plays Shimao's role in the life that
inspired the fiction.
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