A RIOT OF GOLDFISH, by Kanoko Okamoto. Translated by J. Keith Vincent. Hesperus Press, 2010, 136 pp., £8.99 (paper)

Between 1929 and 1932, the poet Kanoko Okamoto traveled through Europe and the U.S. with her husband, the cartoonist Ippei Okamoto, her son and two male retainers. The group visited the capitals of Modernism: London, Paris, Berlin, and New York City, and on her return to Japan, Okamoto applied the principles of what she had absorbed to writing prose.

Beginning with her story "The Dying Crane" about the days leading up to the suicide of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Okamoto's fiction takes the artist in society, the blurring of social strata, the status of religion, and the alienation and pre-eminence of the individual as its key elements.

Like Knut Hamsun's young writer in "Hunger" or Frank Kafka's "A Hunger-Artist," both protagonists of the two novellas contained in this volume consider themselves "artists" isolated from a society that does not understand them, or detached from a capricious god who places obstacles in the way of their genius.