Masuji Ibuse, the author of Black Rain, writes of rural Japan in a style that can only be described by paradox: it is richly dry, profoundly diffident. The excellent short stories of Lieutenant Lookeast conform to no Western expectations of the tale. There is conflict but no resolution, sometimes a beginning but rarely an end. They are not 'slice-of-life', because they deal not with revealing routine but with crisis, which may be the humiliating sexuality of a cow, the madness of a veteran, the imprisonment of a salamander or the trials of a mild policeman in a violent village. In English short stories these crises would most likely be 'turning points'; in Ibuse they simply pass out of range, usually with an irrelevant, and therefore significant, comment on the encompassing landscape. 'Yosaku the Settler' in particular reminds me of the ballet technique of Merce Cunningham, in which expectations...