Japanese Literature Series – serie

Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.Marshland is a revelation of modern Japanese history and culture, a major novel from the hand of a master well-known in his own country, though only the second to be translated into English: the wealth of Kaga’s work in fiction remains to be discovered by the Anglophone world.

A jaded journalist inherits an abandoned manuscript penned by an old acquaintance who has recently passed away. The writing-a collection of ruminations on the nature of existence by a fifty-three-year old businessman who, as far as the journalist remembers, was a kind and gentle soul-is nothing short of shocking. In it, this apparent everyman-whom we know only as Mr. K-writes that he has a son, daughter, and wife, but has no love for them. He claims that humans are like cancer cells, destroying Mother Earth with their unrestrained propagation. He looks at our mortal destiny with an unflinching honesty and turns to psychic mediums for clues to the afterlife, wondering what immortality-if it were possible-would mean for our spiritual well-being. Me Against the World takes the reader down the rabbit hole of the raging mind of this man, who only rejects the world in order to save it from itself.