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()(Translated by Dennis Keene)(A middle-aged businessman reliving a murderous punch-up that happened in his youth ; a chatterbox bar girl cheerfully describing her involvement in a customerLs fantasy life ; a novelist puzzling over an obsession with tree shadows ; and a scholar dabbling irresponsibly in the biography of a famous modern poet.^@This is the rich and varied world into which you are invited, a world of only half-solved puzzles for its inhabitants : the scholar, for example, discovers a tragedy in his own past in place of the impersonal facts he sought ; the novelist, in his search for the origins of his strange preoccupation, encounters a woman who improbably claims to be his mother. It is a world of brilliant surfaces : satirical, at times to the point of parody ; incisive, at times to the point of cruelty. A world also of sudden depths, the mind at last confronting truths it prefers not to acknowledge.^@These two short stories and two novellas make up the second volume of MaruyaLs fiction to appear in English. His novel LSingular RebellionL was acclaimed internationally as La superb piece of urban fiction.L This new collection should serve both to confirm his reputation and to give readers a better idea of the scope of his writing.^@Here is a writer who not only sees the profoundly comic side of human life, but subtly reveals -without resorting to that aggressive sentimentalism which makes some Japanese literature so hard for Western readers to take- its pathos : the fact that we are all emigrants from a past we remember only too little of. It haunts us, and we try to reconstruct it, but most of what is important in it escapes us.^@When LSingular RebellionL appeared, Anthony Burgess generously hailed Maruya as a major comic novelist. With this second volume, the limitation of the word LcomicL may, we believe, be dispensed with.^@Saiichi Maruya [1925-2012] was a professor of English literature before deciding to become a full-time writer some twenty years ago, and he specialized in the twentieth-century novel, his Joyce research being famous. However, what probably most affected him as a novelist was the way the modern English novel could be serious in a light, entertaining manner. He has, for example, translated Graham Greene [among others], but not LThe Power and the GloryL or LThe Heart of the MatterL, but LLoser Takes AllL and LItLs a BattlefieldL ; i.e.,Lentertainments.L His prose is comic -his translation of LThree Men in a BoatL is perhaps even funnier in Japanese than in original- and this reflects his belief that serious themes are only really acceptable in the realistic world of the novel if they take a comic form, for everyday reality is what the novel should be about. If one thinks of the ponderous atmosphere of confessional gloom that envelops most Japanese novels on serious themes, one will understand that this novel [the first of his to be translated into English] was an act of rebellion itself when it appeared in 1972. Even so, it won the prestigious Tanizaki Prize for that year, and he has won most other available prizes since then, being now one of JapanLs most revered men of letters.^@The translator Dennis Keene, an English poet who has lived and taught in Japan for many years, is known for his distinguished translations of MaruyaLs LSingular RebellionL and Morio KitaLs LThe House of NireL, among other works of Japanese fiction.^@„CONTENTS^@THE GENTLE DOWNHILL SLOPE (Titulo original : Daradarazaka, __ā)^@ILLL BUY THAT DREAM (Yume o Kaimasu, ²šŠÜ·)^@TREE SHADOWS (Jueitan, ÷eę)^@RAIN IN THE WIND (Yokoshigure, ”µ®ź)^) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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