Overview
One of the most important Japanese novels of the last two decades, winner of the Tanizaki Prize
Meet the households Kiuchi, Takigawa, Yasunaga, and Oda…. In this gently twisted domestic fable, award-winning novelist Senji Kuroi explores modern Japan through the lives of four families who live on a typical street in suburban Tokyo. Beset by visions, uncomfortable marriages, and strange rumblings of the past and future, these "traditional" Japanese families find the world both magical and perplexing. Are things falling apart or coming together? Is any of this real? Originally serialized as twelve interleaved stories, Life in the Cul-De-Sac is an intriguing and entertaining novel from a gifted writer and observer.
Senji Kuroi is one of postwar Japan's most important novelists. Philip Gabriel translated Haruki Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun.
From the Translator's Afterword:
"Taken together, Kuroi's twelve stories of these four families highlight two main issues of concern not just in Japan but in all industrialized countries-the loss of community and the changing roles of women. . . . Instead of the vaunted Japanese 'group ethic,' Life in the Cul-de-Sac depicts a society of disconnected individuals, of monads cut off from meaningful relationships within their family and with those around them. For most of these characters knowledge of their neighbors comes in whispered speculation and in furtive glimpses through the curtains, while within the home husband and wife, parents and children, talk at cross-purposes. This is a new kind of Japanese 'floating world.'. . ."
Synopsis
A surreal look at four Japanese families on a dead-end street, awarded the Tanizaki Prize.
Library Journal
The rensaku shosetsu, or novel of linked stories, is a popular format in Japan. Kuroi, a major Japanese author, has written two of them around the idea of life in a single neighborhood. This is the better of the two, a 1984 Tanazaki Prize winner often considered to be his masterpiece. The book consists of 12 stories involving four families living in a quiet Tokyo suburb. Kuroi's themes of anomie and personal disconnection in suburban life are not new, especially to readers of authors such as John Cheever and Raymond Carver. But there is a troubling, surreal quality to all the incidents in this book and a meaninglessness in all the interactions of its characters that make its vision unique. Unfortunately, Kuroi is a member of what is known as Japan's "Introspective Generation" of writers, and neither the uneventful tales nor the distanced, unadorned prose (as this translation presents it) promises to attract a broad readership. So while the book is an essential purchase for Japanese fiction collections and essential for fans of Japanese literature it is recommended only for larger fiction collections. [The novel was awarded Columbia University's 2001 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the best modern Japanese literature in translation. Ed.] Tom Cooper, Richmond Heights Memorial Lib., MO Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.