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Good Reading : Febuary 2009
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categorical 1 land of the I t’s early morning and commuters swarm from the subway like ants over a picnic. With iPods plugged into ears and thumbs texting restlessly on phones, they glance at displays in shop windows. Books are everywhere. Clutched in hands, poking through backpacks, and lining shelves in multi-storey bookstores. Books that have been read on long train journeys and during tedious lectures, and even books that have been written on mobile phones, like Love Sky by an author known as ‘Mika’, which, when it was published in book form, was the number one seller for the year and made into a movie. This is Japan, where even the young are enthralled by the written word, buying up the latest literary sensation in their millions. Winners of the Akutagawa Award, which recognises the talents of budding writers, can become overnight celebrities. From there they may go on to win other trophies like the Yomiuri and Tanizaki Awards. After that, who knows? They could win the Nobel Prize. Most Japanese are well acquainted with their nation’s finest writers, but what about the rest of us? Where should we begin? I suggest a short but diverse journey through post-WWII Japanese fiction, encompassing all the biggest prize-winning authors. Let’s begin with Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize. Of the three novels cited by the Nobel committee, Snow Country is probably Kawabata’s 26 goodreading i FEBRUARY 2009 rising stars KERRIANN LOCK invites us to sample some of the profound and poignant award-winning literature of post-WWII Japan. best known. The work, published in 1947, is centred on the tragic heroine Komako, a rural geisha servicing tourists holidaying in a remote town known for its hot springs. Komako’s doomed love affair with self-proclaimed ballet expert Shimamura is played out against a stark, snowbound landscape with an atmosphere of crushing loneliness. In the 1940s, Kawabata mentored a young writer who received three Nobel Prize nominations but never won, becoming better known for his dramatic seppuku, or ritual suicide, committed after a failed military coup. I refer to Yukio Mishima, who received the 1957 Yomiuri Award for The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. This is the factually based story of the young monk Mizoguchi. Rather than being the contemplative Buddhist disciple one would expect, Mizoguchi is filled with hatred for all things beautiful and good. His contempt for traditional spiritual practice culminates in a stunning act of rebellion – he sets Kyoto’s famed Golden Pavilion on fire. Both Mishima and Kawabata were influential writers in 20th-century Japan, but it was Kobo Abe who first bagged all three of the country’s prestigious literary prizes. His best known work, The Woman in the Dunes, won him the 1962 Yomiuri Award. This strange and haunting tale is about Junpei, an amateur entomologist who travels to an isolated seaside town in search of a rare beetle. On his arrival, the villagers offer him accommodation in a young widow’s home, which is located at the bottom of a sandpit. The following day, Junpei finds himself trapped in the sandpit, and is forced to join the widow in her task of shovelling back the endlessly shifting dunes that threaten to cover the town. Abe’s description of daily life in the sandpit is convincingly ‘real’, while the moving sand perfectly mirrors Junpei’s changing emotional and psychological state. Another writer who received both the Akutagawa and Tanizaki Awards is Shusaku Endo. His masterpiece, Silence, won the 1966 Tanizaki prize. The novel reflects
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