Natsu no yami
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Book Overview
This intensely modern novel ... provides vivid insights into the alienated condition of a certain type of Japanese whom we may so often glimpse in the streets of Rome or New York--intelligent, perceptive, and desperately lost between two worlds.--Ivan Morris, author of The Nobility of Failure. The original publication of Darkness in Summer marked the first serious work of Japanese fiction to focus on the Japanese experience in the West. A man and a woman, separated for ten years, meet again, traveling together in Germany. They had been lovers long ago, in Tokyo. Now, incapable of love, they are brought together by sexual desire and by their mutual desperation. No new passion, but their old obsession, may give them back the key to their lives, release them from their terrors, and their rootlessness. The woman is a scholar who has come to hate the Japan that didn't take her seriously, forcing her to pursue a career in the West; the man is a novelist-reporter, lethargic, and an uncommitted observer of other people's wars, sunk into detachment by his professional familiarity with tragedy and chaos. They need each other, and yet they cannot fulfill each other's needs. They savor their world together with urgency as they move restlessly from place to place, finally parting once more to survive separately as best they can.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0804833257
ISBN13:9780804833257
Release Date:March 2005
Publisher:Tuttle Publishing
Length:216 Pages
Weight:0.55 lbs.
Dimensions:0.6" x 5.1" x 7.9"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
Great writer - Akutagawa prize winner
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 17 years ago
This is a modern Japanese novel set in European countries. I read it decades ago as part of my introduction to Japan. I had read Mishma; you couldn't ask for a more brilliant contrast. Kaiko (1930 - 1989) is sophisticated and nihilistic but full of gusto for life as you can see by his enthusiam for food, alcohol, sex, sleep and fishing. Though not set in Japan, it is a fine glimpse to the possibilities of Japanese cosmopolitanism of the 1970s. This book is rich with precious images and wisdom. The same may be said for "Into a Black Sun."
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