Life in the Cul-De-Sac
The rensaku shosetsu, or novel of linked stories, is a popular  format in Japan. Kuroi, a major Japanese author, has written two  of them around the idea of life in a single neighborhood. This  is the better of the two, a 1984 Tanazaki Prize winner often  considered to be his masterpiece. The book consists of 12  stories involving four families living in a quiet Tokyo suburb.  Kuroi's themes of anomie and personal disconnection in suburban  life are not new, especially to readers of authors such as John  Cheever and Raymond Carver. But there is a troubling, surreal  quality to all the incidents in this book and a meaninglessness  in all the interactions of its characters that make its vision  unique. Unfortunately, Kuroi is a member of what is known as  Japan's "Introspective Generation" of writers, and neither the  uneventful tales nor the distanced, unadorned prose (as this  translation presents it) promises to attract a broad readership.  So while the book is an essential purchase for Japanese fiction  collections and essential for fans of Japanese literature it is  recommended only for larger fiction collections. [The novel was  awarded Columbia University's 2001 Japan-U.S. Friendship  Commission Prize for the best modern Japanese literature in  translation. Ed.] Tom Cooper, Richmond Heights Memorial Lib., M.- Tom Cooper, Richmond Heights Memorial Lib., MOCopyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.