Most of these are not worth reading more than once. However, "The Legend of the Paper Spaceship" is a haunting, beautiful story. To me, that redeems the book. The rest of them are amateurish at best, though "The Savage Mouth" has a certain shock value about it.

I came across this in the Waterstone's bookshop on Gower Street, WC1, and chose it ahead of a couple of recent Nebula Award anthologies - I felt that a bit of horizon-widening would not come amiss.

The introductions to the book were interesting in themselves, giving a background to the not-straightforward process of translating into English due to the complexities and nuances of the Japanese language.

The editors do inform the reader that the stories in the volume are quite different to most of the English-language SF, and those who are looking for hard SF are most definitely looking in the wrong direction. The stories collected, which were written between 196x and 199x, are very much at the 'speculative' end of SF, to the extent that some would argue that they do not constitute SF ('it's SF Jim, but not as we know it!). The stories are also on the short side of short SF, which does have implications. I personally would tend to shy away from a collection of such short stories, regardless of origin.

The stories themselves tend towards the contemporary, and reflective, and are about people, and the environment. They tend toward the contempletative, with the protagonist(s) in number of the stories being almost detached from what is happening (a la Ballard) - which is no mean trick when there is a massive confrontation between tyrannosauri and triceratops(es?) in the neighbourhood. A couple of stories would be more accurately described as horror stories, and several could be stories from the likes of Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected and so forth.

All in all and interesting read, and worth the purchase if nothing else just to give an extended flavour of SF in a different culture.

I enjoyed reading this book not only because I am a lover of Science Fiction but also because it was interesting to see SF written from a different cultural perspective. Among these beautifully written and translated stories there is gruesome (The Savage Mouth), thought provoking (Take Your Choice and Standing Woman) and elegant prose (The Legend of the Paper Spaceship). All the stories are unique with concepts distinctive from Western writers but still valuable as entertaining Science Fiction. I recommend this to anyone who wants to read something slightly unusual. I look forward to reading more translations of Japanese SF in the future. Please publish another book.