By James Hadfield

Arts & Culture May. 18, 2009 - 06:53AM JST ( 2 )

TOKYO —

Death isn’t always final in the stories of Jiro Asada. The middle-aged protagonist of the author’s 1995 breakout novel, “Metro ni Notte” (Riding the Metro), spots his long-deceased brother on a subway platform and chases after him, so beginning a series of journeys back in time that will shed new light on his family’s past and eventually help him patch things up with his estranged father.

There are similar forces at work in the 1997 short-story collection “Poppoya,” which is now available in English as “The Stationmaster.” The hero of the title piece is a widower on the verge of retirement, still manning the lonely terminus of a rural Hokkaido line that is due to be shut down. Staunchly devoted to his job, in the way that such archetypes invariably are, he wouldn’t even shed a tear when his wife or infant daughter died: “I’m a railroad man. We don’t cry about family.” But when a young girl who looks strangely familiar stops by at the station, he discovers that he may be able to find peace after all.

The dead make helpful interventions in several more of these tales. A woman’s fraught trip to her husband’s family home in “The Festival of Lanterns” takes an unexpected turn for the better when her grandfather returns from the grave to give the in-laws a good dressing-down. Meanwhile, “In Tsunohazu” finds a defeated salaryman whose career is on the skids given new hope by an encounter with the ghost of his father.

In an enlightening afterword, Asada describes himself as an atheist who nonetheless believes in “miracles [of] the kind that can be evinced by unrelenting effort or sheer anguish.” (It’s hard to see how spectral visitations factor into this picture, but never mind.) His stories certainly wouldn’t qualify as hard-hitting realism, but he throws just enough grit into the mix to keep them from getting too treacly. They’re anchored by well-drawn, recognizably human characters whose redemption—even with the benefit of supernatural assistance—is always small-scale and believable.

The same holds for those stories that don’t make recourse to fantasy. In “Love Letter,” a petty criminal finds himself unexpectedly moved by the death of the Chinese prostitute who he’d agreed to have registered as his wife, despite never meeting her. Another small-time crook pops up in “No-Good Santa,” this time to pay a Yuletide visit to the family of a hapless con he’d met in the clink. The latter is one of the rare moments in the collection when Asada drifts from sincerity into schmaltz; mercifully, it’s also the shortest story here.

With its mix of nostalgia, sentimentality and genuine pathos, “The Stationmaster” struck a chord with the Japanese public when it was first released, going on to sell over 1 million copies and winning the prestigious Naoki Prize in 1997. Three of its stories have been adapted as movies, TV dramas and manga—the most successful of which, 1999’s “Poppoya” (starring Ken Takakura), all but swept the board at the Japanese Academy Awards the following year.

Inspirational but seldom icky, Asada’s writing is likely to appeal well beyond the ghetto into which most translated Japanese fiction is consigned. Anyone who’s ever sneered at “It’s a Wonderful Life,” however, might want to give it a wide berth.

This review originally appeared in Metropolis magazine (www.metropolis.co.jp).