Book Review: "The Book of Tokyo: A City in Fiction" by Michael Emmerich, Jim Hinks and Minashi Matsuie

I love reading Japanese Literature. It holds some of the best modernist and post-modernist literature in the world. Authors such as Yoko Ogawa, Haruki Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima and Junichiro Tanazaki are among just some of my favourites. There is something about the Japanese literary culture which makes it stand out amongst the rest. The sense of 'othering' and 'otherness' is something that has been frequently explored in different ways. For example: the 'othering' of the protagonist's parents in Yoko Ogawa's best-selling masterpiece: "The Memory Police" and the otherness of Yukiko in Junichiro Tanazaki's "The Makioka Sisters". From cats and darkness, the artificial intelligence, monsters and murder - Japanese literature has managed to perfect the modern and post-modern novels and short stories with its truly brilliant originality. This book here is no exception.

I think that my favourite story had to be the one about the young woman and the murderer. There is an unknown murderer walking the streets after having beheaded a woman. The police are failing to catch him and a young woman who is narrating the story is scared to death to walk home alone after realising that the murderer is still on the loose. After meeting a man called Tajima who offers to walk her home, she must weigh out her options about whether he could, in fact, be the murderer or not. She has to choose her safety and ends up going with him. Only, she does not actually go home. She goes somewhere else and she sees things that were probably best forgotten in her mind. The question of whether this man is the murderer hangs over her like a dark cloud, getting darker and darker with every single step she takes to this unknown location.

It is one of the few brilliantly written stories in the whole book, including one about a 44 year old man who meets a 24 year old woman and there are clear generational differences in the way they do things. Such as: the woman actually manages to fish out a coin from an obscure location using a stick, getting an extra 100 Yen. This is all whilst the man was saying that she should probably give up because she would never reach it.

A story about a monster, a man who goes around taking body parts of other people and sticking them to himself - a Frankenstein’s monster tale, is a brilliant way to start off an anthology as well. The story “Model T Frankenstein” is a brilliantly murderous tale, a horrid and gruesome story and written with such precision that it will make you feel physically sick. From existential crisis to existential crisis, you go from being a spirit staring at a goat who is clearly being tortured to feeling the emotional wrath of a man with a bloodlust stronger than many you would know.

In conclusion, I found this book to feed into the tradition of Japanese literature that not only focuses on othering and otherness, but also focuses on philosophical viewpoints concerning what is good and what is bad, what is safe and what is dangerous and how far would someone actually go to preserve themselves over someone else. Is it possible that we could all just be bad human beings and are simply acting like this to appear moral to others? Is there really any such thing as a truly good person with good intentions? Do we all have a second face and are we all actually the ‘others’ that we ourselves, performing morality, perform to be so very afraid of? Maybe we will never know.