Overview

A Wife in Musashino, published in Japanese in 1950, was a major critical and commercial success, and was quickly adapted to the screen by the director Mizoguchi Kenji in 1951. Composed simultaneously with portions of Ooka's great war novel, Fires on the Plain, A Wife in Musashino recounts the story of the ill-fated love between a young demobilized soldier, Tsutomu, and his married cousin, Michiko. The impact on Ooka of French writers such as Stendhal and Radiguet is apparent not only in his finely detailed observations of human emotions, but also in his trenchant critique of social customs and conventions. The novel's depiction of the motivations and circumstances of its characters and its subtle portrait of class conflict and family tensions bring the tumultuous Japanese postwar period to life, revealing with rich insight the impact of the war on Japanese society and on individual lives.

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9781929280285

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Reviews

A compelling story, an excellent translation, and an engaging central problem make the appearance in English of A Wife in Musashino a welcome event. It is easy to see why Ooka Shohei was, and remains, a highly regarded voice of his age. --Erik R. Lofgren, World Literature in Review

Author Information

"Shohei Ooka (1909-1988) was born in Tokyo. He specialized in French at Kyoto University, and was graduated in 1932, after which he made a name as a translator of French literature. In 1944 he joined the Japanese Army, and was taken prisoner in the Philippine defeat of 1945, experiences that figure prominently in ""Fires on the Plain"". In 1953-54 he became a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Yale University, and subsequently lectured on French literature at Meiji University in Tokyo. He authored two novels and contributed short stories and essays to almost every literary magazine in Japan. Shohei Ooka was awarded two literary prizes: the Yokomitsu Prize in 1949 for his first book, ""Record of a POW, "" and the Yomiuri Prize in 1952 for ""Fires on the Plain"". Dennis Washburn is Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies at Dartmouth College. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University in Japanese language and literature. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire."

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