Yumiko Kurahashi:

Writer of cruel fairy tales for adults

A college coed who plants the heads of beautiful boys in ikebana pots; a beautiful young woman whose head flies away to visit her lover every night while her body remains chaste but vulnerable in her bed; a disturbingly close brother and sister who discover a baby alien hatching from an egg under their bed: these are just a few themes of the sexy and surreal stories of Kurahashi Yumiko (1935- ).

Although regrettably not well known outside of Japan, Kurahashi has been a major force in experimental Japanese fiction since the early 1960s.

Her technique ranges from parodies of classical Japanese literature to critically acclaimed avant-garde works, with gothic erotica, ghost stories, and futuristic science fiction in between; but all her works are united by a necessary suspension of disbelief to enter her strange and disturbing world.

It is not unusual for one of Kurahashi's female characters to discuss murdering her boyfriend as blithely as though she were talking about shopping.

Born in Shikoku in 1935, she entered university intending to become a dentist like her father, but changed her mind and pursued a graduate degree in French literature instead.

She was thrust into the literary spotlight at twenty-four, when she won Meiji University's 1960 intramural fiction competition with her first short story, the Kafka-esque "The Party", which satirizes the slavish devotion of a group of Communist Party members. Most of Kurahashi's earlier works exhibit this kind of political polemic, which reflects the turbulent atmosphere of protests and political upheaval in Japan in the 1960s.

For a short time she was even considered a "female Oe Kenzaburo" (whose earlier works were also political in nature), but Kurahashi is quick to point out that she is not a political writer and does not like to write novels concerned with moral and social issues. Rather, as she writes in numerous essays, the point of writing is to exercise one's imagination.

She pushes imagination to its limits in her first work to be translated into English, The Woman with the Flying Head and Other Stories (M.E. Sharpe, 1997). Taken from collections such as Cruel Fairy Tales for Adults (1984) and Kurahashi Yumiko's Creepy Little Stories (1985) and skillfully rendered into English by Atsuko Sakaki, all eleven stories in this fascinating anthology are connected by a few key elements, so that they seem to flow seamlessly into one another.

For example, "The Passage of Dreams" focuses on a love affair between a man and a woman, each grieving over the loss of their spouse.

Their romance is orchestrated by their dead loved ones, who are themselves involved in a relationship in the afterlife. In "Spring Night Dreams", jealous Lady Rokujo from The Tale of Genji reappears as a modern Japanese businesswoman, proud of her own success and independence but controlled by her feelings for her philandering lover.

Finally, "The Witch Mask" involves a rare Noh mask depicting the face of a female demon.

The mask's owner enjoys placing the mask on his girlfriends' faces, and watching them contort in pain as the witch-demon possesses them. What, he wonders, would happen if he put the mask on his own face?

Kurahashi enjoys taking established literary genres and turning them inside out, or mixing them up with discordant elements; in Woman with the Flying Head, old Japanese folktales, Greek myths, and the dramatic Noh share the stage with aliens, math formulas, and sci-fi computer technology.

While many Japanese "women writers" write in order to address female concerns through semi-autobiographical novels about marriage, motherhood, and the trials about being a woman in a male-dominated society, Kurahashi explores these issues of femininity and gender in a bizarre fantasy world of giant carnivorous snakes, demonic Noh masks, and woman/cat changelings.

She occupies a position in the small group of pioneers of post-war Japanese fantasy fiction, and one in an even smaller group of the first experimental women writers. Her "creepy little stories" are truly not to be missed.

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