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First tagged "historical novel" by Council Crest Books
See More Detail tags: japan(2), women, history, japanese fiction, japanese literature, historical novel, japanese colonialism, post world war ii, post war japan
Product Description
In this groundbreaking novel, Fumiko Hayashi tells a absolute story of worried adore and one woman's onslaught to navigate a vicious realities of postwar Japan. The novel's characters, quite a volatile heroine Koda Yukiko, find themselves trapped in their possess drifting, incompetent to mangle out of a fen of indecisiveness. Set in a years during and after World War II, their lives and shop-worn psyches simulate a difficulty of a times in that they live.
Floating Clouds follows Yukiko as she moves from a physically sensuous and pleasing vicinity of Japanese-occupied French Indochina to a gloom and disharmony of postwar Japan. Hayashi's spare, inspiring novel presents a singular mural of Japanese colonialism and a rudeness of Japan's postwar knowledge from a viewpoint of a woman. Its abounding expel of characters, drawn from a behind alleys of civic Japan and a low rungs of society, offers an memorable mural of Japanese multitude after a war.
The tortured attribute between Yukiko and Tomioka, a teenager central with a Department of Agriculture and Forestry, provides a thespian core of a novel. Yukiko meets Tomioka while operative as a receptionist for a Japanese method in Indochina, where they start their affair. After a war, Tomioka earnings to his mom yet stays emotionally complicated to Yukiko, refusing to mangle off their relationship. Meanwhile, Yukiko contingency find her approach in a radically altered postwar Japan. When Yukiko and Tomioka's lives once again cross, a dual set down a trail done by their passion and clarity of desperation.
First published in 1951, Floating Clouds is a classical of complicated Japanese novel and was after done into a film by mythological Japanese executive Mikio Naruse.
(7/16/2006)
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #713465 in Books
- Published on: 2006-02-07
- Original language: Japanese
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .1 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 328 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This touching masterpiece marks a luckless event of Koda and Tomioka as they onslaught to tarry in a scattered years of WWII. Koda meets and falls in adore with Tomioka while operative in southern Vietnam, yet a dual go their possess directions when a fight ends. When they reunite, both altered by a extinction of crusade and a effects of time, they desperately justice tie in a vigourously replaced world.
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* Although it was a basement for a good executive Mikio Naruse's many renouned film, working-class author Hayashi's final novel, published months after her sudden, early genocide in 1951, is too abounding to fit into a dual hours of a required movie. Not that it's a sprawling spectacular. It's about a adore event during and immediately after World War II. Neither partner is generally sympathetic. They accommodate during a forestry hire in Indochina, where he is a botanical officer. He is bold and sarcastic, yet she is captivated to him. They are alone repatriated to Japan, however, and she has to find him out. Resettling in with mom and wife, he is demure to resume their affair. Everything has changed, he says, as she has seen in a enervation and crassness that interfuse Japan in defeat. But resume they do, yet a debilitating settlement shortly sets in. They spend a few days holed adult drinking, creation love, and recalling Indochina. He names a subsequent time he'll see her, and afterwards she doesn't see him until she ferrets him out. Of course, a dual can't--and don't--find happiness, yet they can't give adult one another. They possess a impulses of a heart yet miss all conviction. Presented in an omniscient, reportorially isolated demeanour and as a hardness of not-quite-staccato brief sentences, their story is as convincing a complicated adore tragedy as The Sun Also Rises. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Lane Dunlop's glorious interpretation of Fumiko Hayashi's many distinguished postwar novel presents a distinguished mural of a lady struggling amidst a amicable dislocations of a era. Floating Clouds captures a clarity of detonation that pervaded personal trajectories and reflects a ability of people to refurbish wish and definition among a waste of damaged dreams.
(Joan Ericson, Colorado College, author of Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women's Literature 3/1/07)Floating Clouds, one of Fumiko Hayashi's late masterpieces, draws from a store of her possess conspicuous practice in a depiction of a chaotic, uncertain, bleeding worlds of postwar Japan. With a poignantly elementary poetry style, gracefully translated by Lane Dunlop, she captures a tumult of a time, a audacity of colonialism, and a unfitness of defeat.
(Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis, author of Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan )The novel effectively conveys a discouraging ramifications of a Japanese function of Indochina during World War II.
(Library Journal )It is wise that [Dunlop] give us this critical novel in a initial infallible and entertaining English edition.
(The Japan Times )A conspicuous book.
(Scott Bryan Wilson Rain Taxi )A sprawling mural of Japan only after a finish of World War II... Lane Dunlop's interpretation is excellent.
(Janine Beichman The Japan Journal )
Customer Reviews
Most useful patron reviews
6 of 6 people found a following examination helpful.
The (Rising) Sun Also Sets
By Crazy Fox
You could review hundreds of story books and still not unequivocally grasp what universe events meant to particular lives, to their hopes and dreams and to their personal comedies and tragedies. Hayashi Fumiko does only that in this excellent novel, and all while revelation a good story in a meagre and sheer poetry character fitting her subject, a deteriorating and degraded relationship--and nation--struggling and groping tightly for life. The silly high of Japanese colonialism in Southeast Asia with a trace of assault and imminent disaster comes alive in clear bland detail, correlating with a blossoming attribute between Yukiko and Tomioka, yet a infancy of a story takes place in Tokyo after a defeat, and a contemptible existence of presence in a ravaged multitude and a fee this takes on a romantic lives of a integrate further is rendered in grave and picturesque detail. This correlating contrariety entwines a concept story of relations ripening and afterwards souring with a historically specific story of what typical people in Japan went by in a 1940's in a constrained and effective manner.
That said, a novel isn't perfect. Sometimes a reader's calm with a categorical characters is sorely strained. Not that one has to like a characters for a novel to be good, of course, yet infrequently Tomioka is such a deadbeat and Yukiko so predictably clingy that we start losing seductiveness in what happens to them. And somehow a finale (I will exhibit no spoilers) seems rushed and a bit forced, yet really moving, definitely. Still, such a account could simply have over into complete melodrama in a hands of a obtuse writer, yet Hayashi always keeps a tinge resigned and real, displaying unqualified literary talent and craftsmanship. When all's pronounced and done, this is justifiably a classical novel of a mid-twentieth century.
And only a discerning note, for anyone meddlesome in a remarkable arise of new religions in Japan and open perceptions of them, this novel offers a really intriguing and spiteful take on a phenomenon.
Labels: historical novel
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