Rain in the Wind: Four Stories - Hardcover

Maruya, Saiichi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0233984933 ISBN 13: 9780233984933

Publisher: Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1990

Synopsis

A middle-aged businessman reliving a murderous punch-up that happened in his youth; a chatterbox bar girl cheerfully describing her involvement in a customer's 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 ("Tree Shadows" was awarded the 1988 Kawabata Prize) make up the second volume of Maruya's fiction to appear in English. His novel Singular Rebellion was acclaimed internationally as "a superb piece of urban fiction." 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 Singular Rebellion appeared, Anthony Burgess generously hailed Maruya as a major comic novelist. With this second volume, the limitation of the word "comic" may, we believe, be dispensed with. Maruya's later A Mature Woman has gone one step further to confirm his reputation.

About this title

About the Author

Saiichi Maruya (b. 1925) was a professor of English literature before deciding to become a fulltime writer some twenty years ago; he specialized in the twentieth-century novel, his Joyce research being famous. What probably most affected him as a writer, however, 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 The Power and the Glory or The Heart of the Matter, but Loser Takes All and It's a Battlefield; i.e., "entertainments" His novel Singular Rebellion--described in The New York Times Book Review as "funny, light on its feet, and providing exceptional insight into the ways of the Japanese" was thus an act of rebellion itself when it first appeared in 1972, going against the mainstream of Japan's sombre, confessional modern literature. Even so, it won the prestigious Tanizaki Prize for that year, and he has since won most other available prizes, being now one of his country's 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 Maruya's Singular Rebellion and Morio Kita's The House of Nire, among other works of Japanese fiction.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

[The following is taken from "Tree Shadows."]

I have always been attracted by the shadows of trees, though I would find it hard to explain why. Shadows cast on the ground arouse no particular emotion, even if I don't actually dislike them. It's the vertical shadow that moves me, especially a whole group of them thrown by an avenue of trees, thrown upon a wall. Something profound is stirred in me, a sense of the inconsolable, of some lost home to which I'll never return, yet apprehended with pleasure almost, a deep warmth. The wall itself has to be quite blank, preferably of a weak, negative colour; any form of pattern totally alters the effect. I particularly dislike buildings with lots of windows, surfaces of variegated brick, and am completely put off by those white lines left in concrete when repair work has been carried out. A blank, indifferent surface is best: a view of trees projecting their long shadows onto its wide emptiness seems to reaffirm for me the solitude of all created things, for what truly belongs to any object is only the shadow it casts.

Reflections in mirrors or in water move me little, although I've no great objection to them. Some might think it strange to consider both sets of images as the same type of thing, claiming that there's something quite different about the rich foliage of trees reflected, not in water but, for example, in the glass wall of a large building in the centre of the city, where the effect is of the trees actually growing there inside the building. But though I can see what they mean, I still have to admit that such images leave me fairly cold. What I require is the black pattern created by strong light held back by trees, and this can be sunlight or moonlight, or even the light of a street lamp; and since one can rarely see this cast over a wide, unpatterned surface, I've learnt to find pleasure in only a limited area of shadow, or even in something very faint thrown on a surface already confused by the artificial, multicoloured shadings of other objects.

Edition details

• Publisher: Andre Deutsch Ltd
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0233984933
• ISBN 13: 9780233984933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 190