Tokyo may still be thriving, but in Japan's rural hinterlands, the country has already plunged into a state of advanced senescence. At the start of Kazuki Sakuraba's "Red Girls: The Legend of the Akakuchibas," the book's narrator surveys her hometown and struggles to reconcile the stories of its prosperous past with its humdrum modern reality: "a black, dried husk of a city, where the fires stopped as the times changed, a dead place covered in red rust, transformed into an enormous ruin."