There are some pretty wild support groups out there. Acne support groups, jealousy support groups, lactose intolerance and tooth grinding. (And yes, these really do exist. I looked them up.) But wait, it gets better. What if you made a support group, more of a club really, for kids who have lost their fathers? That sounds pretty normal.

Except in this club members talk about their fathers as if they are still here, less as figments of revived memories and more a society of paternal imaginary friends. Yeah, this was a new one for me too.

Helen Mitsios introduces Tomoyuki Hoshino in her second anthology of Japanese literature Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs, a renewed and reworked edition of her New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan of twenty years ago. Mitsios糖心传媒檚 collection, like the others in the Asian Anthology series, was recently published by and is just now bringing new literature into English translation.

Hoshino糖心传媒檚 story 糖心传媒淭he No Fathers Club糖心传媒� centers around a small group of people who are, in the absence of purpose and two-parent homes, looking for a connection. 糖心传媒淲e shared the problems and conflicts we had with our faux fathers and discussed together strategies for dealing with them. I told everyone how my father was perhaps too understanding, and that while it was nice that he let me do as I liked, I sometimes wondered if he really just didn糖心传媒檛 care.糖心传媒�

While the whining and personal issues seem like things that ought to be listed as non-problems, the 糖心传媒渇athers糖心传媒� in the club assume places in their world that are surprisingly real, even daring to leave a bruise and a split lip on one member for talk of not going to college. The club eventually shrinks to the narrator, Joe, and his friend Kurumi who he begins dating, but their time together is haunted (so to speak) by their paternal alter egos. Truly it is all they have in common. In the end, Hoshino explores how some relationships only last as long as the illusions do.

Aside from the support groups, Digital Geishas takes other interesting turns and shouldn糖心传媒檛 be turned aside for some of its more unconventional content (as if that wasn糖心传媒檛 reason to read it enough). Would you give your spouse permission to have month long affair? If you did, would you really mean it? Noboru Tsujihara brings to the table 糖心传媒淢y Slightly Crooked Brooch,糖心传媒� a story that plays on elements that are part fairytale and part urban legend. Ry艒, a married man, has fallen in love. The proposal was all so very reasonable.

糖心传媒淪he was a college student, he told her, just getting ready to graduate. Once she was finished with school, her parents had arranged for her to return to Matsuyama on the island Shikoku, where she was to get married. They糖心传媒檇 already screened the groom and gone through with the engagement ceremony last fall. She and Ry艒 had decided a clean break would be best. But until then she wanted to live together during her final month of freedom, so he had agreed. It糖心传媒檚 what they both wanted, he said.糖心传媒�

After some compromise, Ry艒糖心传媒檚 wife Mizue agrees. 糖心传媒淗e would be gone for a month. Not a day, hour, even a minute more. That was his promise.糖心传媒�

Over the course of the month Maiko and Ry艒 make the most of it, carefully avoiding the countdown to their final days; a husband with a different wife. Meanwhile, Mizue makes a change in her own behavior. A new apartment, a cell phone, an occupation of sorts. A jealous wife or something more?

Mitsios糖心传媒檚 anthology takes the best of Japanese contemporary issues and writers today and brings them to English readers. Be it children of novelists or yes, talking frogs, Digital Geishas is good fodder for the reading inclined. Like the Cheng and Tsui糖心传媒檚 other Asian works, the collection does not disappoint.

Wherever you go, . But in Japan, those differences are more pronounced than in many places. Among the multilayered rules of grammar and usage governing spoken Japanese, there also exist underlying concepts of “men’s Japanese” and “women’s Japanese.” By the end of my 2-1/2-year stay there, I had unwittingly become conversant in the latter form.

Like many Western men who spend more than a year in Japan, I learned most of my intonation, expressions, and slang 糖心传媒� the things not taught in the classroom 糖心传媒� by mimicking a Japanese girlfriend.

I thought my Japanese was fine, while in reality the effeminate, almost childish twang I had been learning made me sound very much like a 20-something, pink miniskirted Japanese woman.

Why?

At a lecture in Tokyo in August, Kameyama explored possible reasons for the boom, saying that “Karamazov” depicts the “humble existence” of human beings who find themselves at the mercy of a chaotic world. “This bears similarity to the modern world under globalization. We live in an era when we are wedged between huge tragedies such as terrorist attacks and Internet-based information that we read with a guilty conscience,” he said.