THE COAT THAT COVERS HIM AND OTHER STORIES, by Michael Hoffman. Authorhouse, 2004, 632 pp., 2,940 yen (paper).

Japan, having contrived the image of itself as a manifestly gentle society, the spiritual home of garden gnomes and all that is cute and cuddly, is now awakening to a manifestly dysfunctional world. Michael Hoffman's new book, though a work of fiction, is a primer not merely about Japan's breach with sanity, but a timely reminder of how close ordinary lives are to the sulfur pits.

Hoffman has an uncommon grasp of the current social geography. His characters are uncannily like flesh-and-blood people, as if the author had made their actual acquaintance while counseling them in some professional capacity. Shut-ins, teen prostitutes, a girl imprisoned within the room of a disturbed youngster, eruptions of unaccountable violence -- Hoffman's casebook is full. In sharing these accounts, the writer takes us as far as any fiction has gone into the troubled heart of Japan and into the hearts of those non-Japanese who try to make it their home.

Why is it that other people's suffering can be so consoling? Is it merely a matter of catharsis at someone else's expense, the relief of having been spared the same fate? Like David Mitchell's "Number 9 Dream," Holly Thompson's "Ash," and other novels by foreign writers with Japanese settings, there are dangerously thwarted emotions to be confronted and resolved in these works.