A new translation of The Reed Cutter (1932) and the debut of Captain Shigemoto's Mother mark a recognition of the late Tanizaki's continuing literary importance (see above). Both novellas are filled with poignant reminders of Japan's past, particularly its literary past, as the respective narrators frequently quote from famous poems, plays, and stories. These quotations reinforce the mood of time passing, of ``the transience of humanity, whose endeavors fade without a trace,'' and of a deep longing for a brighter past. In The Reed Cutter, the narrator— ``the sadness of autumn pressing in upon him''—takes a walk one September afternoon to the site of a famous palace, now in ruins. He visits the ruins, eats dinner in a local inn, and then decides to cross the river by ferry, recalling that this is the night of the famous autumnal full moon. When the ferry reaches a sandbar in the middle of the river, he disembarks. Here, he meets a reed cutter, also out moon-viewing. As the two share a gourd of sakÇ, the reed cutter tells the story of his father, who on this night would take him as a small boy to watch through a hedge the annual moon-viewing party of the beautiful Lady Oyu, the woman his father really loved. The second novella is a more discursive and allusive work in which the narrator quotes from the classics as he tells the well-known tale of Captain Shigemoto's mother—a beautiful woman who'd married an aging nobleman; she gave birth to one son, but then her husband one night in a drunken fit gave her as a gift to an important Minister, who was a guest in his house. Years later, the now middle-aged son is finally reunited with his mother, a nun at a remote shrine. Elegiac evocations of mood and time, all in luminous prose.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42010-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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