JAPAN: A Traveler's Literary Companion, edited by Jeffrey Angels & J. Thomas Rimer, foreword by Donald Richie. Whereabouts Press, 2006, 232 pp., $14.95 (paper).

It was purely by chance that I read the stories in this anthology while visiting the very same locations that provide their setting, though my journey, starting in Okinawa and ending back in Tokyo, traced the itinerary in reverse.

Some of these stories have appeared in area-specific anthologies of Japanese writing before, including "Jacob's Tokyo Ladder" in the excellent "Tokyo Stories" collection edited by Lawrence Rogers, and "Bones" in a fine book on Okinawan literature called "Southern Exposure."

In "Jacob's Tokyo Ladder," the first story in the collection, Keizo Hino writes about a city that over-stimulates, a place where, at certain times of the day, ensembles of buildings have the power to transmit ideas and sensations. Hino's story is firmly rooted in the architecture of Tokyo's Marunouchi business district, its daylight rigidity of "massive parallelepipeds, constructed with absolute straight lines and planes," mutating via the uneasy perception of the narrator into dark, organically active surfaces, one building with "massive walls, all a dark taupe, making it look as if the whole edifice had been carved out of a mountain of volcanic rock."