Escalators, you can't get off 'em 'til the end

Now, I’m biased, so don’t take anything I say in this post to be absolute. But, I really, really like Michael Gardiner, and his collection of short stories; Escalators. There are nineteen gems to get stuck into, portraying facets of Japanese society that one doesn’t get to experience through watching copious amount of J-drama or anime. Rather, it’s that which runs just under the surface of the enclosed islands. Japan is renowned for its insularity and technological advancement. Often, what we get to see from the Western world is a wholesale adoption of culture – the exchange students who come here to learn English because well – where better than England itself? Let’s be English. They are the foreigners. We go through life only feeling like that on exotic holidays, and even then there’s a tinge of superiority as we put our hard-earned pound sterling in to support a tourist industry and wonder whether we left the tap on. On the other hand, Gardiner’s novelettes (dare I call them that?) provide a glance into what perceptions one gets as a ‘insider’. They’re the sort of stories that one reads and thinks: oh. Yes. I didn’t think it would be like that, but I guess it is. I was slightly terrified by Debut, because I can imagine myself in that position one day – fingers crossed it never happens.

This book is the perfect size to pull out in a queue – they’re twenty pages each at the most, although I read it voraciously in one go, having waited far too long for it to arrive via Amazon. Read it, and mull over it. If you don’t know anything about Nihon, count this as your introduction to it. If you do, then this simply reminds you of the cracks in a mechanic society. I could do the whole ‘Other-as-insider’ spiel but I don’t quite believe it in this case, and anyway, it’s about what you get out of it. But it’s not all sun-avoidance and cute eyes – it’s more of an exploration of the steps between individual and social realities. Having said that, I retract everything and say: go read it. I’ve already passed my copy on to a friend. It’s that sort of book. It needs to be spread.