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The Japanese know the right way to do everything. That's what they say, anyway, "they" being the Japanese. So take whatever "they" say with a pinch of wasabi. Ray Banks, OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE
I'm a nerd. I know that much about myself. I spend most of my time obsessing about stuff normal people don't even bother thinking about. I don't share the same passion as my fellow nerds though as I spend my time deconstructing sports and pop culture instead of Star Wars and online role playing games. One thing every nerd seems to share is a love for Japan and the way they embrace art with abandon and creativity. HANZAI JAPAN: FANTASTISCAL, FUTURISTIC STORIES OF CRIME FROM AND ABOUT JAPAN, a short story anthology edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington is a remarkable attempt at seizing the entire bouquet of Japanese cultural output, at least seen through us gaijins' eyes. It lives to the intense and colorful artistic legacy of the Land of the Rising Sun.
Anthologies are often difficult to review because there are so many voices next to one another and the various short stories go in so many directions, you're not going to love it to death or find it terrible unless it's poorly edited. It's going to be somewhere in between. HANZAI JAPAN ultimately doesn't escape the fate of anthologies, but the stories that hit the spot with me were an absolute riot. Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington did a great job of gathering and fine tuning a series of wild, yet cohesive stories about the various faces of the Japanese underworld. HANZAI JAPAN is as good as it gets for an anthology with a theme that leaves to much place for creative freedom.
I wrote, "This place isn't safe" on the back of the postcard, my kanji unsteady (just as well, if you're trying to look terrified). I waked out backwards, used a branch behind me to cover the worst of my footsteps. There weren't many. Genevieve Valentine, (.DIS)
My two favorite stories in HANZAI JAPAN were (.dis) by Genevieve Valentine and Jigoku by Naomi Hirahara, two authors I hadn't previously read. The Valentine story is the first in the anthology and kicks things off in style with a haunting and moody neo-noir tale with influences of all-time great Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata. The Naomi Hirahara story is a much more in-your-face, oppressive story of crime and punishment about the afterlife of mortal sinners that I thought expressed the sadistic nature of death penalty better than most fiction I've read about the issue except maybe for Yan Martel's Manners of Dying. Jigoku though, unlike the Martel story, is not bound by realism and it's what gives it a life of its own.
These two story really stood out to me, but there were many other solid shorts: Outside the Circle, by Ray Banks, The Electric Palace by Violet LeVoit and The Saitama Chain Saw Massacre by Hiroshi Sakurazaka were also fantastic in their own right and I suspect you'll find your own favorites while reading HANZAI JAPAN, depending on the mood you're in. It is that kind of book that goes into so many directions and does it with such discipline (at the image of the Japanese people) that it is bound to have a story that'll catch your imagination. HANZAI JAPAN brought me back to the early 2000s, back when I was binge watching/reading everything Japanese I could get my hands on. Everything great about Japanese pop culture is in this anthology (or almost).