/lit/ - Literature

>>20349533
Speculative Japan 4 (2018)

Genesis: Dark Birth – Shining Death - Asamatsu Ken (2001)
This is the preface to a novel. I'm baffled to why it was included because it doesn't stand on its own at all. A ninja enters The Inner Realm where there are statues of many mythical beings and things go very wrong.
Excerpts are Unrated

Prototype No. 3 - Kobayashi Yasumi (2008)
I was amused by this because it's so utterly filled with tropes to the point of being self-parodying. It starts with infodumps where another character begs them to stop but the infodumper just continues doing so. Various reversals occur. The initial character isn't the protagonist, assuming usage of "I" means the protagonist. It also plays a bit with reader by not revealing critical information. I don't know whether it's self-aware. For someone who isn't familiar with the relevant tropes this would probably read as even more absurd.
Ok

Nightfall - Suzuki Miekichi (Early 1900s)
Some kind of ambiguous horror story involving spiders, suicide, identity, and lovers.
Blah

Pearls For Mia - Kajio Shinji (1971)
Aki volunteers to be a human time capsule. Mia has a lifelong obsession with him. What a dreadful "romance".
Blah

Dancing Babylon - Makino Osamu (1999)
A surrealist mortification fantasy. A human becomes the pupil of a literal furniture-human hybrid who wants him to become an assault appliance that would live in the Garden of Discipline on the Top Floor. To unlock the human's potential he must undergo increasingly painful religious mortification rituals. Why? Because Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish said so. That's what one of the numerous in-text linked notes said anyway.
Ok

Last Words - Inoue Masahiko (1994)
Two people in the mountains are about to die of hypothermia but he's determined to write until death. I don't know, maybe some people would find this emotionally moving, but I didn't at all.
Meh

The Burning House - Tsukimura Ryoe (2010)
Apparently a side story to a novel which seems to have required reading the novel to appreciate. It says this special police force uses 3.5 meter tall battlesuits, but this is entirely a discussion with a man on his deathbed about events of the past and it didn't even do that well. Maybe the novel is better.
Meh

Vermilion - Ueda Sayuri (2008)
A weird urban fantasy postcyberpunk. A man has a five year old girl stolen from him by a magical being, which have become common in the area, and hires another magical being to find her. It doesn't say it is, but it reads like the introduction to something and seems entirely incomplete on its own.
Meh

Morceaux - Minagawa Hiroko (1998)
Oviparous water serially crystalizes people who are then split in two, polished, and sold. The last paragraph was especially cryptic. I didn't know what I was reading.
Blah