BOOK REVIEW / SHORT STORIES : A Peek Below the Calm Exteriors of Postwar Japan : THE NAME OF THE FLOWER, <i> by Kuniko Mukoda</i> , <i> Translated from the Japanese by Tomone Matsumoto</i> , Stone Bridge Press $10.95 paperback, 152 pages

Life’s happiest moment for Hideko, the protagonist of one of these 13 Japanese stories, comes just before marriage. Walking with her husband-to-be, she points out the moon in the daytime sky. Amazed, he says he never saw this phenomenon before; as a poor youth working his way through college, he “never had time to look up.” Hideko is deeply moved.

The daytime half-moon also resembles a “miscut thin slice” of daikon, or giant radish. This reminds Hideko, in turn, of her skill with kitchen knives. Later in the story, however, she accidentally cuts off her son’s finger. This leads to the breakup of the marriage.

The moon image returns at the end, when the husband seeks a reconciliation. Hideko, wandering the streets in a daze, decides to “go back to her family if the moon was there in the daytime sky. But when she tried to lift up her eyes, fear of what she might not see kept her from looking.”

Two characteristics of this story--on the one hand, a certain commercial bluntness and obviousness; on the other, the use of physical images as units of meaning, as in traditional Japanese poetry--mark this collection by Kuniko Mukoda, who died in a plane crash in 1981 at the age of 53.

Mukoda came late to fiction. She wrote more than 1,000 scripts for radio and television, and in the mid-1970s produced essays that some consider her finest work. Only in 1980 did she turn to short stories, winning the Naoki Prize for “The Name of the Flower,” “The Otter” and “I Doubt It,” all of which are included here.

No doubt Mukoda’s background as a scenario writer influenced her stories. They start abruptly, sum up each new character in a couple of sentences and rely heavily on flashbacks. Often they end with a twist, as in “Triangular Chop,” in which a woman is flattered by the attentions of her fiance’s handsome assistant--until she realizes that the younger man is in love with the fiance, not with her.

This approach has its drawbacks. Mukoda’s characters, once defined, have little room to develop. Her plotting can be heavy-handed, as in “The Fake Egg,” whose title refers to farmers’ practice of putting a porcelain egg into the nest to encourage a hen to lay.

A woman who has no children, and wonders whether she or her husband is at fault, gets pregnant after fantasizing about having an affair with a photographer she meets in a bar. She wonders: “Did she have to have her emotions . . . warmed up first?”

To explain Mukoda’s popularity in Japan, in fact, we may have to look at her audience as much as at the stories themselves.

For Japanese of her generation, the new affluence was undercut by memories of postwar poverty. The feminist ideas of the West had made few apparent inroads, yet well-educated women, waiting at home for husbands to return from long days at work and evenings of drinking with colleagues, felt their traditional stoicism sharpen into dissatisfaction.

Mukoda’s stories spoke to this transitional state of mind. They took a perennial theme of Japanese literature--that beneath society’s surface order, the mask of courtesy and consensus, people can be terribly alienated from one another--and gave it a new edge.

The men in “The Name of the Flower” are often distant and insensitive, but Mukoda recognizes that, like the women, they are trapped. A wife whose husband has been unfaithful can only bear it for the sake of the family; similarly, the husband has no way to flee from his burden of guilt.

Sometimes he snaps, like the man in “Ears” who stays home one day and finds himself searching everyone’s drawers for secrets, or the executive in “I Doubt It,” who impulsively makes a slanderous, anonymous phone call to his boss.

For the Western reader, the plots of Mukoda’s stories are apt to be less interesting than those evocative, poetic details. The husband in the title story who has an affair with a bar girl and shrugs off his wife’s questions is just another deceiver; what lingers in the memory is her vision of his retreating back, broadened by middle age, which seems to ask: “What about it?”