Qiao here asserts that modern Japanese literature, at times absurd and even ridiculous, is created out of traumas both unique to Japan and common to all…. It is encouraging that younger female writers are included [in the book]. Each chapter has its own notes and works cited... an index of works adds to usability. A required resource for students of world literature, Asian studies, and Japanese literature.Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice Reviews

If Japanese fiction today is inexorably linked in the minds of readers with the fantastic—the absurd, the ridiculous, the unconscious real—then rising star Mina Qiao and her fellow critics explain why: a national literary imagination is responding to traumas unique to Japan and others common to us all; to traumas both recent and looming. Starting with Murakami Haruki but moving on to younger, female writers such as Ogawa Yoko, Murata Sayaka, Kawakami Hiromi and Tawada Yoko, the collective project is this: Via close attention to space and time, Fantastical Spaces speaks to how Japanese writers understand the improbable world now itself uncannily unfolding before us.

John Whittier Treat, Yale University