The Dark Room - Softcover

Yoshiyuki, Junnosuke

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870113615 ISBN 13: 9780870113611

Publisher: Kodansha International, 1979

Synopsis

The story of a man who was safe - or so he thought. A man to be envied: the comfortable income, above all, the women ... until things began to disturb the carefully arranged pattern of his life, and he found himself caught in a tightening noose of sexual and emotional involvement....

About this title

Review:

Known in Japan for his translations of the maverick Henry Miller Yoshiyuki here makes the territory of the master his own. Shuichi Nakata is a writer--clearly the author (the lack of critical distance in the writing is reminiscent of both Miller and Bukowski as is the overall style)--whose sexual meanderings and existential ennui draw us casually through a languorous, almost negligent, narrative. A woman, Natsue, begins to beguile and then obsess our narrator. The story starts to focus as Nakata's feelings for Natsue intensify. Yoshiyuki won the Japanese equivalent of the Booker, the Tanizaki Prize, for this lucid, erotic short novel. Despite its worryingly misogynistic overtones (again like Miller and Bukowski) Yoshiyuki's understanding of the incessantness that defines love and defies sense, and his ability to frame and articulate that confusion, marks him out as an artist of note. The Dark Room encourages the need to place modern Japanese literature on writing's world stage. --Mark Thwaite

Synopsis:

A middle-aged man revels in a free and easy life of casual sex, until he finds himself hovering on the edge of commitment and love which loom like a dark room.

About this edition

• Publisher: Kodansha International
• Publication date: 1979
• ISBN 10: 0870113615
• ISBN 13: 9780870113611
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 170