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Hikaru Okuizumi. The Stones Cry Out. James Westerhoven, tr. New York. Harcourt Brace. 1999. 138 pages. $20. ISBN 0-15-100365-3.
Following World War 11, Japanese novelists wrote repeatedly about the social, economic, and personal upheavals of the postwar era. In 1993, Okuizumi Hikaru (b. 1957) wrote a war novel with the violent overtones and minimalist structure of contemporary fiction. The Stones CO, Out is the first of Okuizumi's works to be translated into English.
The novel provides a contemporary twist on the idea of the effects of the war. As in several novels from the 1950s and 1960s, violence shadows the protagonist's life, both in dream and in reality. Ironically, the war-inspired love of geology furnishes this@ man, a veteran, with his one...