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Overview

A remaking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan
 
A True Novel begins in New York in the 1960s, where we meet Taro, a relentlessly ambitious Japanese immigrant trying to make his fortune. Flashbacks and multilayered stories reveal his life: an impoverished upbringing as an orphan, his eventual rise to wealth and success—despite racial and class prejudice—and an obsession with a girl from an affluent family that has haunted him all his life. A True Novel then widens into an examination of Japan’s westernization and the emergence of a middle class.
 
The winner of Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Literature Prize, Mizumura has written a beautiful novel, with love at its core, that reveals, above all, the power of storytelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781590515761
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Publication date: 11/12/2013
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 800
File size: 8 MB

About the Author

Minae Mizumura is one of the most important novelists writing in Japan today. Born in Tokyo, she moved with her family to Long Island, New York, when she was twelve. She studied French literature at Yale College and Yale Graduate School. Her other novels to date are Zoku meian (Light and Darkness Continued), a sequel to the unfinished classic Light and Darkness by Natsume Soseki, and the autobiographical Shishosetsu (An “I” Novel from Left to Right). She lives in Tokyo.
 
Juliet Carpenter studied Japanese literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. Carpenter’s translation of Kobo Abe’s novel Secret Rendezvous won the 1980 Japan–United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

Read an Excerpt

A miracle happened to me two years ago. 
   It was when I was staying in Palo Alto in northern California, writing my third novel or, more precisely, trying to write it. I lacked confidence and was making slow progress. Then, out of the blue, I was made a gift: a true story, just like a novel. What’s more, I was the gift’s sole recipient. The story was about a man I knew, or rather my family knew, in New York at one time. He was no ordinary man. Leaving Japan with nothing, he arrived in the U.S. and made a fortune there, literally realizing the American dream. His prosperity had become a legend among the old Japanese communities in New York—yet no one knew that he’d had another life, marked in the beginning by the poverty-stricken period that followed the war in Japan. The tale would almost certainly have disappeared, lost in the stream of time, if one young man who happened to hear it in Japan hadn’t tucked it away inside him, crossed the Pacific, and delivered it to me in Palo Alto. Of course, he had no idea what effect this would have on me. As far as he was concerned, he merely traveled there on his own initiative, sought me out of his own accord, then went away when he’d told the story he had to tell, and that was that. Yet I felt as if some invisible power had arranged to send this messenger to me. 
   He took all night to tell me the story. Outside, the heaviest rainstorm in California for decades raged, trapping us in the house. The angry power of nature must have affected my nerves: when he had finished, I was in shock. I knew that it was only a series of coincidences that led him there, but it was uncanny that I should know someone who had lived such a life, and that his tale should have come to me, just me.

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