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(★)(Titulo original : おバカさん [Obaka-san], Translated by Peter Owen)(´Wonderful Fool´ is Shusaku Endo´s gentle and humorous narrative of ´mudswamp Japan´ --his phrase for the Japanese inner world of moral apathy and insensitivity to God and sin. A young Frenchman, Gaston Bonaparte, comes to Japan for the first time, and we see Japan afresh through his eyes. At first he seems to be the utter fool both in his ugly horseface appearance and slow-witted thought, but he gradually charms those around him as he bumbles through Japanese society, making mistake after mistake.／ In spite of his mistakes, those around him start to see some endearing qualities in his pure love of both people and animals. Gaston´s wanderings take him to the seamier places in Japan, as he spends time in Sanya with day laborers, in Shibuya with fortune tellers, in Shinjuku with prostitutes, and eventually hooks up with a professional killer.／ His two young hosts, Takamori and his sister Tomoe, are drawn into Gaston´s world and forced to take a deeper look at their own lives and values. Both a provocative tale of clashing culture and new-found morals, ´Wonderful Fool´ also serves as a kind of guidebook to a hidden Tokyo and Japan that few foreigners may have a chance to experience.／ ◆Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) was one of the most popular of the great twentieth-century Japanese writers. Influenced heavily by his Catholic beliefs, his writing focuses on moral issues both in society and the individual. Born in Tokyo and raised in early childhood in the Japanese colony of Manchuoko, he returned to Japan with his divorced mother when he was ten to live with his mother´s Roman Catholic sister in Kobe. He graduated with a degree in French literature from Keio University and spent the next several years studying in Lyons on a scholarship from the Japanese government. Often called ´the Japanese Graham Greene´, he is the recipient of many outstanding literary awards, including the Akutagawa, the Mainichi Cultural, the Shincho, and the Tanizaki prizes.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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