INTO THE WIDENING WORLD: International Coming-of-Age Stories...

INTO THE WIDENING WORLD: International Coming-of-Age Stories edited by John Loughery (Persea Books: $11.95; 268 pp., paperback original). Most cultures mark the onset of adulthood with some sort of initiation; the stories in this new anthology demonstrate the diverse forms that initiation may take. In Yukio Mishima’s chilling “Martyrdom” (Japan), the repressed sexuality of boarding school students leads to a ritual murder; Zakeo, the adolescent boy in “Who Will Stop the Dark” by Charles Mungoshi (Zimbabwe) rejects the Westernized education he’s received for the traditional wisdom of his grandfather. The teen-age narrator of Alice Munro’s “The Turkey Season” (Canada) begins her first job, and learns important lessons in sexuality, cruelty and the effects of alcohol.