SPECULATIVE JAPAN 2: "The Man Who Watched the Sea" and Other Tales of Japanese Science Fiction and Fantasy. Kurodahan Press, 2010, 269 pp., $16 (paper)

A good anthology, particularly one that aims to provide an overview of an unfamiliar subset of a nation's literature, should not please all its readers all the time.

This is certainly true of an anthology that takes as its subject "speculative fiction," a term that, as Edward Lipsett notes in the preface to "Speculative Japan 2," "has never really been nailed down." Lipsett mentions: "science fiction, fantasy, horror, ghost and other supernatural stories, and alternative history" as just a few of the genres that might, in speculative fiction, come into play, and most of those genres — sometimes more than one to a story — are represented here.

All the stories are good of their kind, but are of so many different kinds that it's hard to imagine a single reader who will revel in them all.