The tree reminded him of himself. Akiyuki didn't know what kind of tree it was, and he didn't care. The tree had no flowers or fruit. It spread its branches to the sun, it trembled in the wind. That's enough, he thought. The tree doesn't need flowers or fruit. It doesn't need a name.Unfortunately, the third story here ("Red Hair") is a disappointment--the kind of cheerless, one-note erotica that makes sex look like a torture devised by Existentialist philosophers. No matter; grand, tragic, and structurally complex, "The Cape" and "House on Fire" contain enough Freudian drama between them to keep a pair of Faulkner scholars obsessed for weeks. Skillfully translated by Eve Zimmerman (who also provides a preface, afterword, and helpful family tree), this is fiction of explosive power and formal daring. --Mary Park]]>
A former gang leader beats his parents to death when they forbid his relationship with a girl from the ghetto.
These seven stories by Kenji Nakagami (1946-92) reflect the violence and hardship of his own short life. Born in a slum in eastern Japan, he grew up among gamblers, drinkers, day laborers and smugglers. His mother, an illiterate peddler, had six children by two men; his father, five children by four women. No wonder that complex, shifting family relationships became a major theme in his work. But, above all, it was the suicide of his older brother that darkened Nakagami's early years. It was to haunt him all his life.
From the start, Nakagami was the antithesis of the Japanese man of letters. Tall and powerfully built, he turned down the opportunity to become a sumo wrestler. Instead, he found work in a car factory and then as a baggage handler at Tokyo's Haneda Airport. All the while he was producing stories and poems, and in 1976 he made his name by becoming the first writer born after the war to win the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. His rise from factory worker to literary lion is one of the great success stories of modern Japanese literature.
His novels depict the brutalized lives of people from the ghetto in a terse, aggressive prose style that is entirely Nakagami's own. Other autobiographical works analyze his stormy and often violent relationship with his long-suffering wife.
The short stories in this collection--his first book to appear in English--represent his best work in this form. They range in setting from the present day to the Middle Ages, with a varied cast of warriors and hoodlums, dreamers and priests. Here is the dark side of human nature: cruelty, prejudice, deformity, lust. Again and again Nakagami confronts us with the disturbing fact of man's ultimate helplessness before the power of female sexuality. And each story unfolds against the otherworldly landscape of his native Kumano, the wild mountainous region that Nakagami called "the crotch of Japan."
The stories collected here are "The Mountain Ascetic," "The Wind and the Light," "Snakelust," "Makeup," "Crimson Waterfall," "A Tale of a Demon," and "Gravity's Capital."
]]>The tree reminded him of himself. Akiyuki didn't know what kind of tree it was, and he didn't care. The tree had no flowers or fruit. It spread its branches to the sun, it trembled in the wind. That's enough, he thought. The tree doesn't need flowers or fruit. It doesn't need a name.Unfortunately, the third story here ("Red Hair") is a disappointment--the kind of cheerless, one-note erotica that makes sex look like a torture devised by Existentialist philosophers. No matter; grand, tragic, and structurally complex, "The Cape" and "House on Fire" contain enough Freudian drama between them to keep a pair of Faulkner scholars obsessed for weeks. Skillfully translated by Eve Zimmerman (who also provides a preface, afterword, and helpful family tree), this is fiction of explosive power and formal daring. --Mary Park]]>