THE COLORS OF HEAVEN: Short Stories From...

THE COLORS OF HEAVEN: Short Stories From the Pacific Rim edited by Trevor Carolan (Vintage: $11; 319 pp., paperback original). Although the work of some Japanese and Chinese authors appears in the United States, “Colors of Heaven” represents the first attempt to offer a survey of contemporary fiction from the entire Pacific Rim. Most the stories focus on the alienation produced by moving from a traditional, agrarian way of life to an urban, Westernized one. Cut off from their ancestral ties to the countryside, the aimless lovers in Yoshiko Shibaki’s “Snow Flurry” (Japan) suggest “rootless, aquatic plants adrift in the city, perhaps, or leaves floating on the stream--something of that sort--and in no sense contributing members of society.” In “Chinatown” (Korea), O Chong-Hui’s withering portrait of cultural colonialism, a young girl announces, “I’m going to be a GI’s whore when I grow up”; a lonely civil servant fights a degrading battle against a corrupt bureaucracy in the moving “Heartland” by T. Sionil Jose (Philippines). Vintage should expand this interesting anthology into an annual series.