In this, her first collection of short fiction, Hiromi Goto brings us characters grappling with the metaphorically and literally monstrous in themselves. Rooted as they are in notions of family and self-identity, these stories address women with visions skewed and splintered by the pain and tenderness of new motherhood, men whose closest ties seem not only ephemeral but searingly strange, and those whose circumstance and psyches have ruptured their realities.

The collection’s strengths and weaknesses are in its fearlessness. Goto is obviously undaunted by the odd and unexplainable viscera of life and death, which makes for some risky, raw storytelling. “From Across the River” is a powerful evocation of the fierce discombobulation brought on by the loss of a child. Here, a grieving mother’s intense distress manifests itself in visions of a hunched and bow-legged foreigner. Similarly, in the unsettling “Home Stay” a recently separated man’s deep misgivings about his place in the world are resurrected in a pair of frozen goldfish.

Goto’s magic realist technique can sometimes seem a poor substitute for more nuanced complexity. In “Tales from the Breast,” a frustrated breastfeeding mother, in a transparently symbolic gesture, transfers her boob (and its attendant responsibility) to her unsuspecting male partner. And in the title story, an uptight Christian woman is forced to wrestle with notions of normalcy when she gives birth to a baby with a tail.

It is Goto’s “generation/culture gap” tales that best showcase both the author’s talent for handpicking weirdly appropriate moments and building solid characterization. In “Tilting,” members of an extended family, reunited at the airport, reminisce in stilted monologues that perfectly embody both the accretion of their experiences and the near-impossibility of communicating them effectively. The author builds a quiet tension in “Drift,” where a mother and daughter get lost in the woods, but stumble upon a moment of clarity and connection in the midst of their exhaustion.

These are the stories that, without resorting to too much supernatural trickery, truly deliver both a disturbing frisson and a psychological punch.