Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

Science fiction and meta-fiction have a lot in common: Both are obsessed with showing the ways reality can be bent and layered. So it’s surprising that there aren’t more writers like Japan’s Yasatuka Tsutsui, a sci-fi novelist and meta-fiction pioneer who loves overlapping elements of fantasy and literary self-consciousness. Take the first story in his newly translated collection, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno, in which a houseplant causes a man to have erotic dreams. Very quickly, the hero’s own sex dreams get tangled with his wife’s, his neighbor’s and, eventually, those of a character who is probably dreaming the entire story, including the magic plant.

The collection’s early pieces all play with this “What is real?” question. Some, like the one about the simple office worker who becomes a tabloid star by virtue of the fact that people want to read about a nobody, also feel like perfect evocations of How We Live Now. Others, like the title story, or the very short vignette about two men using a time machine to laugh at their five-minutes-previous reaction to the existence of said time machine, just take sheer delight in the absurd.

But read more, and a pattern emerges. In nearly every story, the protagonist is an innocent (if unadmirably wimpy) man whose life is made miserable by a nagging housewife. By the end, these housewives aren’t just demanding fancy clothes and morning sex, they’re forming angry mobs, waging murderous campaigns against smoking and, in “The World Is Tilting,” setting up a feminist dictatorship straight out of the most paranoid dreams of a rabid anti-Hillaryite. Tsutsui’s inventiveness loses steam once he gets caught up in the housewife menace, meaning the best way to read this collection, unfortunately, is to simply skip any story that has a female character in it.

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