The Shooting Gallery: & Other Stories (New Directions Classics)

From Publishers Weekly
With graceful, sensitive prose, Yuko Tsushima tells eight slice-of-life stories of lonely, burdened contemporary Japanese women who seek "a sense of well-being that captured . . . what the word happiness meant." In "South Wind," Akiko takes a lover; her husband and daughter leave her. She bears the lover's child and raises him on her own, with occasional visits from the father. The title story features another single mother, "hemmed in by the cracker crumbs, plastic blocks, empty juice cans, underwear and socks that littered the room," who takes her two children to see a beautiful beach but instead finds a seashore strewn with rubbish. In "The Chrysanthemum Beetle," Izumi suspects that her boyfriend has another lover; she finally confronts him and walks out. Then the other woman calls and asks to meet her. Tsushima (Child of Fortune) conveys the passion and pain of her characters through her vivid accounting of the details of everyday life. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Tsushima has been honored in her ) native Japan for her fiction. One novel ( Child of Fortune ) has been translated, but this is her first collection of short stories to appear in English. These eight stories all deal with women facing some kind of social problem or predicament or attempting to define their own identity. The situations reflect Japanese social mores, sometimes at odds with ours, but will be meaningful to readers from any culture where women are attaining new freedoms. The translation occasionally vacillates between American and British English, but the overall rendering is smooth and appropriately colloquial. Highly recommended both as literature and as social comment. Donald J. Pearce, Univ. of Minnesota, Duluth, Lib. Reviewers with sound critical judgment 8 and an interest in literary fiction, experimen tal writing, and/or fiction in translation are invited to send two sample reviews to Bar bara Hoffert, The Book Review.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Language Notes
Text: English, Japanese (translation)


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Tsushima has been honored in her ) native Japan for her fiction. One novel ( Child of Fortune ) has been translated, but this is her first collection of short stories to appear in English. These eight stories all deal with women facing some kind of social problem or predicament or attempting to define their own identity. The situations reflect Japanese social mores, sometimes at odds with ours, but will be meaningful to readers from any culture where women are attaining new freedoms. The translation occasionally vacillates between American and British English, but the overall rendering is smooth and appropriately colloquial. Highly recommended both as literature and as social comment. Donald J. Pearce, Univ. of Minnesota, Duluth, Lib. Reviewers with sound critical judgment 8 and an interest in literary fiction, experimen tal writing, and/or fiction in translation are invited to send two sample reviews to Bar bara Hoffert, The Book Review.


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