Flight Paths of the Emperor

Jere D. Turner is Adult Collections Co-ordinator, Regina Public Library.

It is easy to see why Stephen Heighton is an award-winning author. This
exceptional collection of short stories holds the reader’s attention
completely as the author deftly explores, through the interaction of
Eastern and Western cultures, the theme of change. More specifically, he
shows us varieties of experience through the lives of a number of
characters who have lived in the period between World War II and present
day.

These stories are connected by a mystical thread: an object of great
importance in the sky, which is, alternately, a plane, a baseball, a
bomb, and a bright light. This thread becomes very evident by the fourth
story, “Magi.”

“Five Paintings of the New Japan” explores the intimate world of
the people who work at a small café. The narrator is a Canadian working
there part-time to supplement his salary as an English teacher, and it
is through his eyes that we see everyday changes at the café and
realize that a more ominous change is to come. Change is also central to
the title story, in which the reader again encounters a young English
teacher who is forced to leave Japan at a time when the Japanese
themselves are going through a time of turmoil, their emperor ill and
close to death.

In “A Man Away from Home Has No Neighbors,” one of the most
interesting stories, this Japanese proverb is explored through six
separate examples. Most of them are related to war and acts of depravity
or outright foolishness. Soldiers die unnecessarily, women are raped,
and neighbors in a foreign land prove that they are not the neighbors of
one’s homeland. The story is a most penetrating look at morality and
its absence.

This fine collection of stories will leave the reader with a vivid
insight into human experience.