Shame in the Blood: A Novel - Softcover

Miura, Tetsuo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582434700 ISBN 13: 9781582434704

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2009

Synopsis

Shame in the Blood (Shinobugawa) is considered one of the finest contemporary love stories in all of modern Japanese literature. The narrator, a young college student, has had two brothers disappear, lost two sisters to suicide, and his third sister is physically disabled. He is determined not only to survive but to thrive in spite of tormented thoughts that his family’s blood is cursed.
Told as six interlocked and layered stories, the novel builds and deepens as the particulars of everyday life provide a moving, beautiful testimony to the love and power of youth and commitment. The whole story is tinged with melancholic sadness often associated with Japanese literature, where the feeling of love itself is a little death.”
First published in Japan, Shame in the Blood was made into a film directed by Obayashi Nobuhiko, and won the Akutagawa Prize for Literature, launching Tetsuo Miura’s career. Working in the great tradition of Japanese novelists from Soseki to Kawabata, from Mishima to Abe, Miura takes his place as one of the greatest living Japanese writers.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

A young man struggling under his cursed family history marks Japanese author Miura's first work translated into English, an intricately layered if claustrophobic collection of six stories from 1960. Five of the six stories are set in postwar Japan and treat in a chronological jumble a university student narrator's courtship with and marriage to a young Tokyo waitress and his decision not to have children because of the fate of his siblings: the narrator's two older brothers ran off, two sisters committed suicide and several of them were visually impaired, leaving him, the youngest, feeling ashamed and sinful. He marries the cheerful, hardworking waitress Shino, but won't find a job, and despite the money Shino brings in, they descend into penury. Upon the death of his father, the narrator rescinds his decision not to have children, and with Shino pregnant, they return to his family's home in Honshu, hoping for a fresh start. The sixth story involves different characters but similarly treats a husband's hope to start fresh after he learns his wife was raped before marrying him. The five connected stories, despite their erratic time lines, present an intriguing and kaleidoscopic view of a life. (Dec.)
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Review

"[W]hat makes Shame in the Blood so interesting . . . is the way it illustrates the shifting values of a foreign culture."

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1582434700
• ISBN 13: 9781582434704
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224