Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "atom-bomb"
Trout Life (Atom Bomb)
'Masu' (as in Masuji) in Japanese happens to mean trout.
He stood firmly apart from the left-wing trends in late-1920s literature. Instead of literary agitation, he preferred river fishing, and wrote a series of essays about this peaceful hobby. He was always 'The Compassionate Angler'.
Ibuse's post-war writings are often filled with bitter condemnations of the war and its after-effects.
On Black Rain, his most famous work: 'Written in an understated tone, and with a thread of irony running through it, this novel is nevertheless by far the most devastating account of the effects of nuclear war ever written.'
His name had been put forward for the Nobel Prize, and he would have been the ideal candidate because of his anti-war stance. It was a matter of indifference to him when he did not receive it. He hated literary log-rolling and the tedium of social life, and when he was awarded his cultural merit prize in 1966, he felt he could not face all the dignitaries and journalists, so slipped away unobserved to a neighbouring restaurant where he spent the night celebrating on his own with sushi and flagons of sake.
Ibuse was a perfectionist ... typically wry, self-deprecating humour.
Besides the quality of his writing and his eloquent quietism, one of the things I most value about Ibuse is that he generously helped a tormented misfit, Japan's greatest modern novelist, Osamu Dazai, giving him money, giving him a room in his house and introducing him to publishers and editors at a time when Dazai was in the grip of drugs and alcohol and tried several times to kill himself.
He was that delightful rarity, an untypical Japanese, who nevertheless never lost his native soul, and enriched his native tongue.
writer = sakka 作家
Read! Yome!
読んでください!
Write! 書いてください!
He stood firmly apart from the left-wing trends in late-1920s literature. Instead of literary agitation, he preferred river fishing, and wrote a series of essays about this peaceful hobby. He was always 'The Compassionate Angler'.
Ibuse's post-war writings are often filled with bitter condemnations of the war and its after-effects.
On Black Rain, his most famous work: 'Written in an understated tone, and with a thread of irony running through it, this novel is nevertheless by far the most devastating account of the effects of nuclear war ever written.'
His name had been put forward for the Nobel Prize, and he would have been the ideal candidate because of his anti-war stance. It was a matter of indifference to him when he did not receive it. He hated literary log-rolling and the tedium of social life, and when he was awarded his cultural merit prize in 1966, he felt he could not face all the dignitaries and journalists, so slipped away unobserved to a neighbouring restaurant where he spent the night celebrating on his own with sushi and flagons of sake.
Ibuse was a perfectionist ... typically wry, self-deprecating humour.
Besides the quality of his writing and his eloquent quietism, one of the things I most value about Ibuse is that he generously helped a tormented misfit, Japan's greatest modern novelist, Osamu Dazai, giving him money, giving him a room in his house and introducing him to publishers and editors at a time when Dazai was in the grip of drugs and alcohol and tried several times to kill himself.
He was that delightful rarity, an untypical Japanese, who nevertheless never lost his native soul, and enriched his native tongue.
writer = sakka 作家
Read! Yome!
読んでください!
Write! 書いてください!
