Items related to Death of a Salaryman
Wonderfully surreal, painfully real, this is the story of a Japanese salaryman who loses his job at a TV corporation, on his 40th birthday, and slips through to a different layer of society, a shadowy world where curious characters show him the way - a travelling salesman with a passion for Elvis, a pachinko pro with dreams of returning to Hawaii, and a TV producer who will stop at nothing to get his big break - and Kenji sets off on a roller-coaster ride of misadventures. He tries to make money from the pachinko machines - and succeeds - but his conventional, snobbish hardworking wife finds this demeaning. He has a hated mother-in-law who's a genius at winning magazine competitions and knows the wife of a bank manager. So our hero ends up instead in the postroom of a huge bank...With a little help from his friends, he makes his way out and via a bizarre chain of happenstance (including being struck by lightning while wielding a golf club) finds himself responsible for a TV reality game show so weirdly believable that some crazed tv executive may well be pitching it now. Against all odds, the salaryman dies - to be reborn as a human being. Fresh, original and funny without signalling its humour, this astonishing debut novel brilliantly captures the fast-changing culture of Japan (where the author lived and worked for a brief period) and its surreal underside in an engaging portrait of an ordinary man battling with the contradictory demands of contemporary life.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
`An enjoyably sentimental journey of self-discovery, the novel betrays no hint of dislocation between author and subject matter.' -- Financial Times
`Fiona Campbell's comic caper is an entertaining overview of Japanese
society's collision with the worst excesses of western culture.' -- The Guardian
"Kenji is the kind of luckless dreamer it's hard not to root for"
-- Observer, April 22, 2007
This is an absolutely brilliant first novel -- The Times, Saturday 18th April
From the Publisher:
`Fiona Campbell's comic caper is an entertaining overview of Japanese
society's collision with the worst excesses of western culture.' -- The Guardian
"Kenji is the kind of luckless dreamer it's hard not to root for"
-- Observer, April 22, 2007
This is an absolutely brilliant first novel -- The Times, Saturday 18th April
Imagine the literary lovechild of Marina Lewycka and Murakami and you get close to Death of a Salaryman ,a sparkling debut with graphic-novel sharpness, humour and poignancy, set in contemporary Japan.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherChatto & Windus
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 0701180951
- ISBN 13 9780701180959
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages368
- Rating
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DEATH OF A SALARYMAN
Published by
Random House UK
(2009)
ISBN 10: 0701180951
ISBN 13: 9780701180959
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Softcover
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