DISCOVERIES

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Tales of Moonlight and Rain

Ueda Akinari, translated from the Japanese by Anthony H. Chambers

Columbia University Press: 236 pp., $27.50

HERE are the rain-moon tales -- gothic accounts of spirits that appear on rainy nights or on mornings when the pale moon is still visible. These tales by poet and tea master Ueda Akinari were first published in 1776. Akinari, born in Osaka in 1734, wrote numerous haiku and two collections of stories about ordinary people and edited several anthologies of Japanese poetry before entering the rainy, moonlighted world of demons and ghosts. Some of the tales, like “The Carp of My Dreams,” in which a monk stops breathing and dreams he has become the carp in one of his paintings, resemble parables; others, like “The Kibitsu Caldron,” depict the evils of social convention; still others, like “The Blue Hood,” examine the vagaries of human nature -- the difference between one who can corral his demons to attain Buddhahood and one who cannot. In all of them, the specter of repression lurks under the veil of virtue, waiting to haunt the victim in another form or another life. Akinari seems to mock the virtuous, with their vows of poverty and rigid ideas of how life should be lived. In “On Poverty and Wealth,” the spirit of the gold hoarded by a samurai visits him in the form of a tiny old man who declares: “The Way of wealth is an art -- the skillful will accumulate much; the foolish will crumble more easily than tiles.”

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Was She Pretty?

Leanne Shapton

Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 200 pp., $20

“LEO’S ex-girlfriend had a cult following.” “Monty’s ex-girlfriend Weronika taught him how to speak Polish.” These and other revelations accompany illustrator / writer Leanne Shapton’s quirky William Steig-like drawings. Together they describe in the tersest possible way the agonies of curiosity we all suffer over our lovers’ past romances. Inspired by a new boyfriend’s photos of ex-girlfriends, Shapton collected her friends’ fears: “Elizabeth had no problem with exes. It was the women who replaced her that drove her crazy. They always had: thinner ankles, poutier lips, and PhDs.” Ethiopian royalty, muses, ballerinas, unforgettable sex, old journals -- it’s all here. “Isabelle found a vacation snapshot of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. She ripped it up and left it in a neat pile on his pillow.” Eugenie found a hairclip. “She threw it in the garbage.” “Shane’s ex-girlfriend was a child prodigy.” There’s something compelling about these vignettes; they twist in memory as the reader turns the pages, smug in the knowledge that never in a million years would she let herself sink so low.

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Recyclopedia

Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge

Harryette Mullen

Graywolf Press: 180 pp., $15 paper

HARRYETTE MULLEN teaches English and African American studies at UCLA. These poems, from three collections published in the 1990s, reveal a poet with an unflinching eye, sifting through the facts for something beautiful. “Punched in like slopwork. Mild frump and downward drab. Slipshod drudge with chance of dingy morning slog. Tattered shoulders, frayed eyes, a dowdy gray. Frowzy in a slatternly direction.” In many of the poems, like this one, characters emerge from a landscape. Boundaries between people, places and things are often blurred: “why these blues come from us / threadbare material soils / the original colored / pregnant with heavy spirit / stop running from the gift / slow down to catch up with it / knots mend the string quilt / of kente stripped when kin split / white covers of black material / dense fabric that obeys its own logic / shadows pieced together tears and all / unfurling sheets of bluish music / burning cloth in a public place / a crime against the state / raised the cost of free expression / smoke rose to offer a blessing.” History, religion, generations of joy and suffering -- it’s all here. “[L]eave your fine-tooth comb at home,” the poet warns; “improve your embouchure,” “proceed with abandon.” Here are the rules, if only we would follow them.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com