We here at VIZ Media aren’t all manga, or all SF, all the time. Sometimes we publish novels that defy genre categories. One such is The Stationmaster by Jiro Asada. When I first read it, I was reminded of Shirley Jackson—some of Asada’s stories are supernatural, others straightforward realism. He’s by turns blunt and sentimental, intimate and journalistic. I asked Rebecca Downer, who edited this great short story collection for VIZ Fiction, to offer up a few words on a volume that’s called in its native country, “the book that made Japan cry.”
Jiro Asada’s stories in The Stationmaster are by no means epic in scope. Rather, they deal with very ordinary people, even very flawed people, who suddenly find their lives touched by the extraordinary. One could call these illuminating moments supernatural, or as the Japanese publisher tagged them, miracles. Whatever you call them, I think, in most of the stories, they are the product of the characters’ suffering. The stationmaster, for instance, in the title story, is experiencing the deepest anguish of his life. His station is about to close and his grief over the deaths of his wife and daughter is as sharp as though they just happened. Some benevolent force allows the old stationmaster relief in the form of his daughter, returning to him at the age she’d be if she’d lived. Perhaps it is a miracle; perhaps it is the old man’s own personal process of reconciling with his past—a sign he’s forgiving his past and letting himself move on. Whatever the case, it happened in that moment of deepest despair.
One of my favorite stories in the collection is “Devil.” There’s that kind of creeping dread that you find in the best of classic ghost stories, which turns out to be the perfect foil for this tale of the dissolution of a family, told as it is from a child’s point of view. The young boy who is both main character and narrator can’t really comprehend what is happening around him, and the story he invents to explain the events he is witnessing is both chilling and revealing.
In nearly all the stories it’s at that point of utter helplessness that a kind of protection for the character is conjured into being. Whether it’s a person—a ghost? a figment of the imagination?—or a story, a visit to the past, or a letter, Asada shows a deft hand in finding that ideal source of redemption, reconciliation, forgiveness, and forgetting, in each of his (not so?) ordinary characters’ lives. Sure, maybe they’re not epic, but the scope of human emotion the stories contain is pretty impressive.
