There are no familiar stereotypes in a new collection of Japanese literature compiled by J. Thomas Rimer and Jeffrey Angles. No geishas. No hard-working, hard-drinking businessmen.
The memoirs and short fiction in Japan: A Traveler's Literary Companion focus on the power of place: Osaka's working-class marketplace, for instance, or the lasting impression made by a rare snowfall in the rural islands.
Angles, a professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, tells Debbie Elliott about the book.
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