The Waiting Years. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Waiting Years

The beautiful, immature girl whom she took home to her husband was a maid only in name. Tomo's real mission had been to find him a mistress. Nor did her secret humiliation end there. The web that his insatiable lust spun about him soon trapped another young woman, and another ... and the relationships between the women thus caught were to form, over the years, a subtle, shifting pattern in which they all played a part. There was Suga, the innocent, introspective girl from a respectable but impoverished family; the outgoing, cheerful, almost boyish Yumi; the flirtatious, seductive Miya, who soon found her father-in-law more dependable as a man than his brutish son.... And at the center, rejected yet dominating them all, the near tragic figure of the wife Tomo, whose passionate heart was always, until that final day, held in check by an old-fashioned code.

In a series of colorful, unforgettable scenes, Enchi brilliantly handles the human interplay within the ill-fated Shirakawa family. Japan's leading woman novelist and a member of the prestigious Art Academy, she combines a graceful, evocative style that consciously echoes the Tale of Genji with keen insight and an impressive ability to develop her characters over a long period of time. Her work is rooted deep in the female psychology, and it is her women above all-so clearly differentiated yet all so utterly feminine-who live in the memory. With The Waiting Years, a new and important literary figure makes her debut in the Western world.

FUMIKO ENCHI, the daughter of a famous scholar of the Japanese language, was born in Tokyo in 1905. Without completing her studies at the Girls' High School of the Japan Women's University, she left to study drama. Her first play, Banshun Soya, performed at the Tsukiji Little Theater, was a success. At twenty-five she married a journalist, but after the unhappy war period, when all her property was destroyed, she determined to concentrate entirely on writing in order to escape the oppression of domestic life. A short story published in 1952, Himojii Tsukihi, was acclaimed by the critics and won the coveted Women Writers Prize. With illness and the psychological stresses of middle age, her writing took on an acute realism which set it apart from the subdued tones of traditional Japanese writing. On the publication in 1957 of The Waiting Years-a novel she took eight years to write-she won Japan's highest literary award, the Noma Prize, and is now a member of the Art Academy.