Collected Short Stories
2nd Edition
The common challenges and concerns faced by the isolated communities of the Philippines are the focus of the tales collected in the reissued book Collected Short Stories.
With its bucolic settings, Sinai C. Hamada’s resonant book Collected Short Stories focuses on humble, mountain-dwelling peasants from the Baguio area of the Philippines in the prewar and postwar eras.
First published in 1975, this edition includes four previously unpublished stories. Its vignettes are direct and accessible, with themes of love, quotidian hope, ennui, loyalty, and betrayal among rural highlander people. Its characters appear without ceremony, as when a long-departed son returns, an unhappy wife leaves and returns to her husband, or a bachelor is persuaded to marry. Courtships occur between people of all ages, leading to lifelong, unrequited, or unsatisfied love. Subthreads about wandering eyes and hearts weave through many of the stories.
The narrations focus on everyday activities and evade people’s inner thoughts. The tales often hinge on single events or decisions in the characters’ lives. All are bounded by their times and locations. Because their action scenes are limited, their emotional impacts are cumulative; some come from the collection as a whole rather than individual instances, resulting in a deeper sense of the common challenges and concerns faced by the isolated communities at the book’s center, which seem to have been forgotten by modernity. The stories are often unresolved, ending on discordant notes of disquietude that evoke Russian classics.
The consistent narrative restraint limits access to the interior worlds of the characters, though. Even those stories narrated by their characters avoid sharing their true thoughts. This somewhat flattens the book, belying its array of personalities and viewpoints.
And the plots are rather uncomplicated, often featuring no more than a single family or couple. They avoid dramatic escalations and are unadorned. Their lessons are implied rather than pronounced, emerging from the choices the characters make, whether good, bad, or in between, that nonetheless invite empathy for their plights.
The book’s limited rhetorical flourishes are saved for descriptions of the beauty of the mountains and farmland where the stories take place. Against a backdrop of dirt floors and shacks, sweet potato fields and rice wine, village celebrations and isolated living, characters struggle to build happy lives, embodying timeless virtues of the human condition. Indeed, the universality of their struggles and triumphs is emphasized throughout.
With stylistic and narrative restraint, Collected Short Stories focuses on the everyday experiences of rural people living before and after World War II.
Reviewed by
Brian D. Henderson
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
