Bøger i Japanese Literature serien

Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.Marshland is a revelation of modern Japanese history and culture, a major novel from the hand of a master well-known in his own country, though only the second to be translated into English: the wealth of Kaga’s work in fiction remains to be discovered by the Anglophone world.

This Naoki Prize-winning work is a personal yet precise account of the lives of working women in the Edo period (1600-1868). In the latter half of the Edo period, the warrior caste was finding itself pushed out of the top echelons of society by the rising merchant class, and repeated famines swept the countryside. Against this backdrop, a small number of women vigorously built themselves independent lives with unusual careers--working as designers of ornamental hairpins, or even scribes--in the male-dominated society of the day. The stories in The Budding Tree recount the conditions in which these women lived.

A Day in the Life contains twelve portraits of the vivid and curious realities experienced by a man in his sixties. These stories focus on the tiny paradoxes and everyday ridiculousness we each witness and of which we often take no note. Ranging from a visit to an exhibition of blurry photographs each taken with an exposure time of only a single second, to the story of a man stalked through the streets by a stranger for no greater a crime than making eye contact, A Day in the Life demonstrates why Senji Kuroi is considered one of the leading figures of contemporary Japanese literature.

This book collects two novellas by the noted Japanese painter: "e;Family Business"e; and "e;1,001 Pillars of Flame."e; In the first, Megumi-like the author, a long-time resident of the United States-pays a visit to her now eighty-seven-year-old mother in Japan. After so many years living abroad, Megumi simply can't understand contemporary Japan, and when her nephew runs away from home, and her elderly mother gives chase, Megumi finds herself having to relearn Japanese survival skills in an effort to bring them home safely. In "e;1,001 Pillars of Fire,"e; another Japanese-American woman, Yu, has been living in California for decades-which makes it all the more painful that she's just as subject to discrimination now as ever. When, in the wake of the Rodney King trial, LA's African-American population begins to riot, Yu learns just how much damage exclusion can do-finding it even within her own family.