A LOST PARADISE
by Junichi Watanabe & translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter
This very popular 1997 Japanese novel, a bestseller that also spawned a successful television series and feature film, is a relentlessly detailed chronicle of the folie d'amour that consumes a middle-aged publishing executive and a younger woman, both unhappily married to other spouses, each devoted to histories and images of others before them who gave all for love. Watanabe traces with unerring precision the ways in which his principals' defining traits—Kuki's self-conscious masculinity and habit of command; his lover Rinko's passivity and yearning for some grand passion that will inflame and ennoble her—drive them irreversibly toward a harrowing, inevitable conclusion. A grownup love story and then some, powered by two brilliant characterizations and some unusually acute psychological analysis.