EMBRACING FAMILY

A married salary man watches his male authority crumble amid seismic cultural shifts in postwar Japan in Kojima’s 1966 novel, translated into English for the first time.

In late-’40s Tokyo, GIs teach schoolgirls the finer points of the Charleston, department stores stock Western-style bathtubs and Miwa Shunsuke, who had spent some time in the U.S., earns a living by lecturing his countrymen on the American way of life. His own household, in the meantime, spins out of control: Wife Tokiko has taken to openly mocking her husband in front of their snickering children, with even the maid joining in the defiance. When Tokiko admits an affair with an American boarder, Shunsuke stifles his rage and plunges instead into the kind of self-flagellating introspection the reader will recognize as very Western. Metaphorically and literally impotent, he proceeds to seethe throughout most of this slim novel, as the travails of cuckoldry give way to an immeasurably more terrifying ordeal—Tokiko's breast cancer. Shunsuke's is a book-length loss of face, exacerbated by cutaways to disapproving onlookers (sentences to the effect of “Everyone turned and stared” form a pulsing refrain). Tokiko, her side of the story left untold, comes across as an entirely unpleasant nag, in sickness and in health. The unblinking, methodical manner in which Kojima ushers a somewhat blank hero through gauntlets of tragedy is reminiscent of Yukio Mishima's Death in Midsummer. Kojima, however, takes the taut minimalism that permeates much of ’60s Japanese prose to its logical endpoint. His writing, unaffected to the point of being scrubbed clean of anything resembling style, dissipates into a screenplay-like list of things characters did, said and felt. The boxy translation, which has one character casually remarking, of another, “He feels sheepish and obliged,” is of no particular help.

Light on literary value, this is an informative snapshot of a moment when the violent shock of exposure to Western values was impacting every aspect of Japanese life.