These are excellent pieces, but they’re surpassed by the bittersweet “super-frog saves Tokyo,” a Walter Mitty–like fantasy of empowerment enriched by delicious comic detail.

Each presents a vividly realized central figure: Komuro, the complacent salesman of “ufo in kushiro,” whose passive relationship with his even more passive wife is transformed, after she leaves him, into an awakened sensitivity to the dangers lurking in the everyday Junko, a rootless young woman inexplicably drawn (in “landscape with flatiron”) toward a suicidal artist obsessed with building bonfires and underachiever Yoshiya (in “all god’s children can dance”), whose baffled relationships with his abstracted mother, possibly nonexistent father, and God are set forth with crackling funereal wit. They’re ingenious dramatizations of the emotional aftershocks of the massive 1995 Kobe earthquake. Surrealism, fantasy, and powerfully restrained emotion are the distinctive features of six spectacularly original and gripping linked stories: the latest from the internationally renowned Japanese author of Sputnik Sweetheart (2001), etc.