May 14, 2008
Review of Shotaro Yasuoka's The Glass Slipper and Other Stories
My brief review of Shotaro Yasuoka's collection The Glass Slipper and Other Stories, out next month from Dalkey Archive Press, is in this week's Village Voice. The introduction:
Success greeted the Japanese author Shotaro Yasuoka, now nearly 90, immediately upon the publication of the short stories that make up The Glass Slipper and Other Stories. With frugal, occasionally lyrical prose (translated by Royall Tyler), these works, from the early 1950s, prize emotional and psychological depth over narrative propulsion, and feature hapless, illness-prone, passive narrators. "Like someone who's just fallen asleep," muses one, "I was drawn along through the empty city as if by an irresistible force."
The city is Tokyo, emptied out by the ravages of World War II, and Yasuoka's misfits glide through it in search of a decent job or some other sense of direction.
The whole review is only twice as long as this teaser; to read the rest, click here (and scroll down; it is the last of four short pieces).