Shipwrecks - Hardcover

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Yoshimura's first novel translated into English is almost a mythical tale of a poor Japanese village whose fathers sell themselves into bondage to support their families and whose tradition of celebrating o-fume-sama (shipwrecks) is a dark secret of murder and looting. Isaku, the nine-year-old main character, learns that the cauldrons that distill salt from seawater burn on the beaches for more than village income; they are intentional traps meant to lure passing vessels aground on their rocky coast. The o-fume-sama are awaited and ritualized each year with everyone's participation. One year, however, the spoils of the villagers' trap are fatal to their village. Isaku learns a hard, bitter truth as Yoshimura seems to teach a lesson through this book, both about the ugly parts of history and about how people participate in, condone without thought of consequences, ritualize, and justify heinous and desperate acts. Ealey's accessible and graceful translation adds to the power of Yoshimura's tale. Janet St. John

Yoshimura's resonant reconstruction of the poverty-stricken life in a medieval Japanese fishing village is the first of his 20 novels to be translated into English. Nine-year-old Isaku's humble existence is defined by personal habit and village ritual. While his father is indentured for three years, Isaku grows from an uninformed innocent to a 12-year-old seasoned by brutality and tragedy. Living on the border of starvation, villagers depend on such cyclical catches as squid, octopus and sardine. They collect linden bark for kindling and thread. They also depend on the O-fune-sama, annual winter sailing ships lured by the fires from salt cauldrons burning on the shores. When a ship runs aground on the reef, the villagers habitually slaughter the crew and live off bales of rice and other cargo. One O-fune-sama, however, spells doom. Its crew's secret booty is smallpox. Uncompromising details of the plague lead to a melancholy conclusion when the infected chief decrees mountain banishment for all who carry the disease, including Isaku's mother, brother and his first love. Isaku, his life changed irrevocably, is left alone to endure a bittersweet reunion with his father. Yoshimura's lean novel gracefully recounts the daily struggles of impoverished people to retain-and even create-their humanity under conditions in which mere survival is an achievement.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The first English translation of a veteran Japanese writer who is president of his country's writers' union and the author of 20 novels. This 1982 work, set in a coastal village in medieval Japan, recounts the hurried journey toward manhood taken by its protagonist, nine-year-old Isaku. In their impoverished village close by the sea, Isaku's family and neighbors carry on a long- accepted tradition: They distill salt from sea water to sell to other villages--and they live in the hope that the flames beneath the boiling cauldrons placed near the shore will lure passing ships onto the nearby rocks, thereafter to be looted and plundered. ``O- fune-sama'' (their term for this illicit bounty) occurs only infrequently until one winter when, after an unexpectedly short interval, a mysterious ship is found drifting near shore, all of its dead passengers dressed in red clothing and disfigured by red spots on their bodies. The villagers strip them of their garments and possessions--and retribution proves as swift as it is terrible. This disturbing fable resonates with mystery, its events seen through the puzzled eyes of young Isaku, who is just beginning to intuit the imperatives of sexuality and to shoulder his burden as the man of his family, since his father, who has sold himself into indentured servitude in a distant village, is usually absent. The novel's structure works beautifully: Its first two thirds, virtually plotless, offer a vivid portrait of Isaku's fascination with local folkways and superstitions; thereafter, things happen with momentous inevitability, climaxing when those who have been punished most grievously for the community's sins must suffer the additional ordeal of banishment. Isaku's father returns home to a family changed beyond anything he can imagine. A seamless interweaving of description, characterization, and narrative, and an enduringly powerful image of a vanished time and place. More, please, of Yoshimura. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.