Rain in the Wind by Saiichi Maruya

Author:Saiichi Maruya [Maruya, Saiichi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kodansha International
Published: 1990-04-19T17:00:00+00:00

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Furuya Ippei was born in 1909 in a town on the northern sea coast of west Japan. He was the third son of the principal local landowner. The eldest son of the family went into government service, managing to rise to the rank of under-secretary in one of the ministries, and then worked as president of a number of public companies before dying some ten years ago. The second son became a doctor and, after teaching at two or three universities, was made director of a large hospital in Fukuoka but died suddenly just after taking up the appointment. There were also two younger sisters who married into other households and, since none of the sons remained at home, the family house no longer exists. The neighbouring town extended its boundaries, and where the house once used to be is now a supermarket which caters mainly to a nearby housing complex for public employees of various kinds.

This third son of the Furuya family studied French at a university in Tokyo, after which he worked first in the publicity department of a film company, then as a journalist, a teacher of French at a private university, and in the editorial section of an extra-departmental government organization; all the while writing novels and criticism. Before the war he had a certain reputation as a writer, but he was unable to make a living by his pen until the post-war period. In terms of age he has to be considered a writer of the thirties, but he hardly fits into any of the categories that implies, nor does he obviously belong to any post-war school either. He has always been more or less outside the literary mainstream, but this has not prevented his being recognized for his distinctive style, and he is now respected as a grand old man of letters, still very much alive. A thirteen-volume collected works came out about fifteen years ago, and an enlarged twenty-volume edition appeared some ten years later.

It is difficult to find any single adjective that describes the way he writes. One critic has compared his style to that in vogue towards the end of the last century before naturalism took over the literary world. Another, in a book-length critical study, has stressed the ideological nature of his work, seeing him as a writer of the “social novel of ideas,” although this is clearly a misreading of Sartre’s dictum that the roman a thése should also be a roman de moeurs, an idea misunderstood to the extent that he even referred to Furuya as an existentialist writer. This really won’t do at all, for the tone of his novels has nothing whatsoever to do with the depressed atmosphere enveloping that post-war Parisian world. The American translator of one of his novels and a collection of short stories has made the wild claim that Furuya’s writing is closer to Chinese than Japanese literature, a throwaway remark which was taken seriously enough by a Japanese critic for him

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