| NOTA |
()(Translated by Dennis Keene)(LThe House of NireL ended with the two family-run mental hospitals poised on the brink of World War II : their founder, the eccentric Kiichiro, is dead ; his heir, the scholarly and reluctant Director Tetsukichi, is at a loose end, estranged from his extravagant wife Ryuko ; his daughter Momoko has disappeared into China with her second husband ; and the grandchildren are now old enough to be drawn into the coils of war.^@This second and final volume has an obviously more somber mood than the first, for it deals with fire, defeat and the first months of the occupation. The humor that dominated the first volume has grown no weaker here, but it concerns a reality that isnLt easy to laugh at. A scholarLs obsession with collecting books is transformed into a passion for hoarding canned food. A girlLs dream of happiness is destroyed by the accident of war, not only in the death of the man she loves but in the terrible wound that desfigures her face.^@A hypochondriac uncle and his pockmarked colleague disappear somewhere in China and Siberia. And one of RyukoLs sons, once a militarist of sorts, starves on Wake Island and, in one of the tours de force of the novel, drifts helplessly in the Pacific before being washed back onto those barren shores, desperately fighting for his life. It is this mere desire to go on existing with which the novel ends, as the awful egoism of Ryuko --custodian of the Nire legend-- is shown as one necessary part of the life force, even the more repellent aspects of the human character having their own role in the working out of the human comedy.^@Ultimately one realizes that the Nire Hospital is providing an image of Japanese society as a whole, no less telling for being so tactfully understated, and that the book is not yielding laughter and amusement so much as the wisdom of the everyday, a respect for the way people actually feel, think and behave. The foreign reader will experience this again and again as he discovers how close these LalienL events in an LalienL time and place are to his own.^@Morio Kita was born in 1927, second son of Mokichi Saito, perhaps the greatest traditional Japanese poet of this century. (A portrait of his father is given in the character Tetsukichi, although the reader should be aware that this is no closer to real life than any character in a novel, as is also the case with the self-portrait provided by Shuji.) Kita entered medical school at Tohoku University in 1948, but attended few classes since he had already decided to become a writer, concentrating instead on the novels of Thomas Mann, who was to become a lasting influence on his literature.^@During his student days he began taking notes for a novel, which he hoped eventually to write along the lines of LBuddenbrooksL ; this was to be LThe House of NireL. In 1953, the year his father died, he passed the state qualifying medical exam, and in the following year published his first novel, Ghosts, a lyrical autobiography concerned mainly with the deaths of his parents, sister and friends.^@In November of 1958 he became shipLs doctor on a six-month voyage to Europe, recorded in his humorous novel LDr. ManboLs VoyageL, which appeared in 1960 and became a bestseller. In 1960 he also received his M.D. for a study of schizophrenics. The first draft of LThe House of NireL was written in 1961 and the novel completed in 1963, receiving the Mainichi Prize in the following year and establishing him as a leading writer. It is his first novel to be translated into English.) |
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