Manyebook

Rain in the Wind: Four Stories

About Specification

A middle-aged businessman reliving a murderous punch-up that

happened in his youth; a chatterbox bar girl cheerfully describing her

involvement in a customer's fantasy life; a novelist puzzling over an

obsession with tree shadows; and a scholar dabbling irresponsibly in the

biography of a famous modern poet.

This is the rich and varied world into which you are invited, a world of

only half-solved puzzles for its inhabitants: the scholar, for example,

discovers a tragedy in his own past in place of the impersonal facts he

sought; the novelist, in his search for the origins of his strange

preoccupation, encounters a woman who improbably claims to be his mother. It

is a world of brilliant surfaces: satirical, at times to the point of

parody; incisive, at times to the point of cruelty. A world also of sudden

depths, the mind at last confronting truths it prefers not to acknowledge.

These two short stories and two novellas ("Tree Shadows" was awarded the

1988 Kawabata Prize) make up the second volume of Maruya's fiction to appear

in English. His novel was acclaimed internationally as "a superb piece of urban

fiction." This new collection should serve both to confirm his reputation

and to give readers a better idea of the scope of his writing.

Here is a writer who not only sees the profoundly comic side of human life,

but subtly reveals — without resorting to that aggressive sentimentalism

which makes some Japanese literature so hard for Western readers to

take — its pathos: the fact that we are all emigrants from a past we remember

only too little of. It haunts us, and we try to reconstruct it, but most of

what is important in it escapes us.

When Singular Rebellion appeared, Anthony Burgess generously hailed

Maruya as a major comic novelist. With this second volume, the limitation of

the word "comic" may, we believe, be dispensed with. Maruya's later has gone one step further to confirm his reputation.