Customer Comments

This book is so smart that if I were a zombie I would eat it.

Hanzai Japan, like The Future is Japanese and Phantasm Japan before it, manages to dial in on anthology excellence with a strong selection of stories that are both diverse and focused, and consistently above-average. Combining Japanese work in translation with pieces from English-language authors who have the chops to treat Japan as a real setting and not just a cyberpunk wonderland has worked out beautifully for this series. This third entry focuses on crime stories with a fantastic element, the peanut butter and chocolate of crossed genres. The stories you will find here range all the way from fun romps to haunting meditations on human frailty and perversity. Stand-out stories included "Run!" by Kaori Fujino, the first fresh take on 'inside the mind of a serial killer' that I have seen in many a long day; Carrie Vaughn's "The Girl Who Loved Shonen Knife", an entertaining nod to teenage fandom that is both knowing and energetic; the dream-like "Sky Spider" by Yusuke Miyauchi; and not one but two stories in which maps play an important role - "[dis.]" by the always-excellent Genevieve Valentine and "Monologue of a Universal Transverse Mercator Projection" by Yumeaki Hirayama, a striking story that reads as though Hans Christian Anderson and Edgar Allan Poe had a baby who was brought forward in time and reared on the work of James Cain. If you have any love at all for crime, the fantastic, or Japan, you should definitely check this out.

A strong entry from Kurlansky, who uses an obscure subject and an unconventional structure to create a book that is satisfyingly focused while still communicating a vast amount of information on topics from cod fishing to the Spanish Civil War.

If I find Buechner's logic appallingly weak, I accept that may be because I'm not really in the target audience for this book. But it has glaring flaws regardless of the reader's belief system, including a weak through-line, repetitiveness, and a general lack of apparent thought in choosing and ordering the included essays. Buechner is constrained and stuffy when writing about emotionally fraught issues, and often tedious when he thinks he is being charming. Above all, I can't shake the feeling that this is not so much a book as a collection of odds and ends tossed together to fulfill a commitment as old age or an impending deadline interfered with the author's ability to finish a cohesive project.

A fascinating meditation on free will and effective action that will also appeal to lovers of pop biology and, curiously, to many of the very hipsters it mocks (of course, hipsters like nothing better than to mock other hipsters, so....)