It's an old theatrical principle that when constructing an evening of short items you should put your best piece last and your second-best one first. Richie's final tale is certainly one of his more promising. It's about a company outing in which a group of businessmen is persuaded to sample the delights of a hot-spring bath contained inside a cable-car cabin. This is untypically farcical for Richie, more like comic masters such as Mo Yan than this generally laid-back author.
The cabin, rather predictably, gets stuck, leaving the businessmen suspended above the treetops in cooling water. Richie's problem is what should happen next. I'll leave you to discover the development he opts for, but it doesn't equal in interest the initial situation he's so ingeniously imagined.
Nevertheless there does seem something slightly pretentious about the currently fashionable genre of the very short story. It has the same relation to a 20 or 30-page tale that a photo has to a full-length film -- it may say a lot for its size, but it can hardly compete in scope with its more expansive brother. There's also another shortcoming: it can create expectations that run counter to the author's wishes.
Reading these stories, for example, I found myself getting hooked on brevity and wishing they were shorter still. If you can have a story of 1,000 words, why not one of 100, or 50, or maybe just five? But then you run into serious difficulties. To write a story with three characters and a happy ending, all in five words, would be a challenge. "He chose the prettier sister." That would match the criteria. But would it qualify as literature?
All in all, it wasn't possible to find a really striking story here. Nevertheless, the overall impression left by these vignettes taken as a whole was not unpleasant. Richie, on the evidence of this slim book, isn't a master narrator. But his long experience has given him an elaborate set of perspectives on modern Japanese life, and for these we should be grateful.
RSS