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(★)(池澤夏樹／ Translated by Alfred Birnbaum／ Titulo original : 花を運ぶ妹 [Hana o hakobu Imooto, 2000]／ An intelligent, cosmopolitan novel set in the exotic surroundings of Bali and alive with suspense, drug intrigue, courtroom drama, and political tension,´A Burden of Flowers´ is based on a true story of the 1980s.／ The action centers on Asia-traveling Japanese artist ´Tez´ Nishijima and his Europhile sister Kaoru. When Tez is arrested in Bali on charges of heroin trafficking and faces the death penalty, his parents are paralyzed with shame, leaving his Paris-based sister to come to the rescue. She enlists the help of an old expert on Indonesia and two of his friends, and --´like Dorothy with the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow´-- sets off to challenge a shadowy and, to her, very alien situation. Her brother, languishing in jail, thinks back over his journeys in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, to the two women --one sweet, one sinister-- who changed his life there, to his subsequent slow spiral into drug addiction... and to the day a police stooge planted a cigarette carton filled with heroin in his room in the Kuta Beach ´backpack territory´ of Bali. Tez´s life hangs in the balance, tipped one way by the maneuverings of a dangerous senior police officer, and the other way by the investigative efforts of an undercover agent who, in a powerful climax, is shot and left for dead...／ ´A Burden of Flowers´ is both a Pan-Asian adventure that will appeal to readers familiar with ´The Beach´, and a cutting-edge portrait of the ´New Asia´ in which Japan -the long-lost, economically spoiled child of the region- is still struggling to find itself.／ ◆Natsuki Ikezawa, born in 1945 and regarded as one of the best serious writers in Japan, is known for his love of islands, and lives on one in the far south of the Japanese archipelago. Since his debut as a novelist at the age of thirty-nine, Pacific islands have provided the setting for seven of his major works [´Natsu no Asa no Seisoken,1984´,´Mariko/Marikita,1990´,´Babiron ni ikite utae,1990´,´Tamarindo no Ki,1991´,´Minami no Shima no Tio,1992´,´Masiasu giri no Shikkyaku,1993´, and ´Hana o hakobu Imooto,2000´]／ One of his first works to be translated into English,´Still Life´ -part of a collection of four stories published by Kodansha International under the title ´Still Lives´- was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1987. ´A Burden of Flowers´ received another coveted literary award, the Mainichi Prize, in 2000.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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