First published in Japanese in 1966, the debut novel of the critically acclaimed author of Singular Rebellion is an unusual portrait of a deeply taboo subject in twentieth-century Japanese society: resistance to the draft in World War II. In 1940 Shokichi Hamada is a conscientious objector who dodges military service by simply disappearing from society, taking to the country as an itinerant peddler by the name of Sugiura until the end of the war in 1945. In 1965, Hamada works as a clerk at a conservative university, his war resistance a dark secret of the past that present-day events force into the light, confronting him with unexpected consequences of his refusal to conform twenty years earlier.

Grass For My Pillow

Literature & Fiction

Maruya, Saiichi

United States

Columbia University Press

Literary

We all know, or think we do, that Japan is a conformist society, millions of inscrutable faces all with the same ideas in their heads. Surely that Japanese businessman you met last week, for example, couldn't have had one rebellious thought inside him? Not very likely, of course, if you think about it, and if you want to know just how unlikely, this book will tell you.   Set in the rebellious year of 1969 when rioting students seemed poised to overthrow the whole setup, this novel is about the need all of us have, as individuals, to conform, and also to rebel; rebellion depending on conformity, and conformity demanding that rebellion be a solitary, singular affair. The narrator is a middle-aged employee of an electrical goods manufacturer, a job he has because, when a career civil servant at MITI, he'd refused a transfer to the Ministry of Defense. Those about him see this as a pacifist gesture, a rebellious act, but for him it was nothing as simple as that, for here we have a human being, not an ideological cardboard cutout, and his motives were, and still are, mixed. As the book opens, rebellion takes the form of marrying a young fashion model, a wild act for a former bureaucrat, yet even this seems to come about more by accident than choice, involving him in a more seriously rebellious world as his wife's grandmother turns out to be a murderess (she'd carved up her estranged husband with a razor, more or less by accident too), and the various confusions her coming to live with them gives rise to are the real comic center of the novel.   In society itself an even more singular rebellion is going on, shown in graphic detail in the famous assault on one of the large Tokyo stations. This is seen through the eyes of a young photographer who has his own gesture of rebellion to make, the rejection of a congratulatory speech at a marvelously chaotic prizegiving ceremony which is one of the comic highlights of the book.   The novel deals with serious political and social ideas, but there is no flourishing of slogans or easy images of despair, for comedy does not rub ideas in one's face. Here we have what life was like in Japan fifteen years ago, and it hasn't changed much since then. If you want to know how the Japanese business elite think and feel, and what a Japanese professor is like; if you want to understand the Japanese bureaucratic mind, and what goes on inside the head of a young Japanese woman, or even what goes on inside a Japanese women's prison--then read on. If you don't particularly want any of these things, but just something genuinely stimulating to read, then this is also it.

Singular Rebellion

Hunter Publishing+inc

Rain in the Wind: Four Stories (English and Japanese Edition)

Contemporary

Kodansha USA Inc

We all know, or think we do, that Japan is a conformist society, millions of inscrutable faces all with the same ideas in their heads. Surely that Japanese businessman you met last week, for example, couldn't have had one rebellious thought inside him? Not very likely, of course, if you think about it, and if you want to know just how unlikely, this book will tell you. 
Set in the rebellious year of 1969 when rioting students seemed poised to overthrow the whole setup, this novel is about the need all of us have, as individuals, to conform, and also to rebel; rebellion depending on conformity, and conformity demanding that rebellion be a solitary, singular affair. The narrator is a middle-aged employee of an electrical goods manufacturer, a job he has because, when a career civil servant at MITI, he'd refused a transfer to the Ministry of Defense. Those about him see this as a pacifist gesture, a rebellious act, but for him it was nothing as simple as that, for here we have a human being, not an ideological cardboard cutout, and his motives were, and still are, mixed. As the book opens, rebellion takes the form of marrying a young fashion model, a wild act for a former bureaucrat, yet even this seems to come about more by accident than choice, involving him in a more seriously rebellious world as his wife's grandmother turns out to be a murderess (she'd carved up her estranged husband with a razor, more or less by accident too), and the various confusions her coming to live with them gives rise to are the real comic center of the novel. 
In society itself an even more singular rebellion is going on, shown in graphic detail in the famous assault on one of the large Tokyo stations. This is seen through the eyes of a young photographer who has his own gesture of rebellion to make, the rejection of a congratulatory speech at a marvelously chaotic prizegiving ceremony which is one of the comic highlights of the book. 
The novel deals with serious political and social ideas, but there is no flourishing of slogans or easy images of despair, for comedy does not rub ideas in one's face. Here we have what life was like in Japan fifteen years ago, and it hasn't changed much since then. If you want to know how the Japanese business elite think and feel, and what a Japanese professor is like; if you want to understand the Japanese bureaucratic mind, and what goes on inside the head of a young Japanese woman, or even what goes on inside a Japanese women's prison--then read on. If you don't particularly want any of these things, but just something genuinely stimulating to read, then this is also it.

Kodansha Amer Inc

SZ-Bibliothek Metropolen Band 9: Die Journalistin

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Jueitan (Japanese Edition)

Bungei Shunju

Kodansha International/USA Ltd.

A middle-aged businessman reliving a murderous punch-up that happened in his youth; a chatterbox bar girl cheerfully describing her involvement in a customer's fantasy life; a novelist puzzling over an obsession with tree shadows; and a scholar dabbling irresponsibly in the biography of a famous modern poet. 
This is the rich and varied world into which you are invited, a world of only half-solved puzzles for its inhabitants: the scholar, for example, discovers a tragedy in his own past in place of the impersonal facts he sought; the novelist, in his search for the origins of his strange preoccupation, encounters a woman who improbably claims to be his mother. It is a world of brilliant surfaces: satirical, at times to the point of parody; incisive, at times to the point of cruelty. A world also of sudden depths, the mind at last confronting truths it prefers not to acknowledge. 
These two short stories and two novellas ("Tree Shadows" was awarded the 1988 Kawabata Prize) make up the second volume of Maruya's fiction to appear in English. His novel Singular Rebellion was acclaimed internationally as "a superb piece of urban fiction." This new collection should serve both to confirm his reputation and to give readers a better idea of the scope of his writing. 
Here is a writer who not only sees the profoundly comic side of human life, but subtly reveals--without resorting to that aggressive sentimentalism which makes some Japanese literature so hard for Western readers to take--its pathos: the fact that we are all emigrants from a past we remember only too little of. It haunts us, and we try to reconstruct it, but most of what is important in it escapes us. 
When Singular Rebellion appeared, Anthony Burgess generously hailed Maruya as a major comic novelist. With this second volume, the limitation of the word "comic" may, we believe, be dispensed with. Maruya's later A Mature Woman has gone one step further to confirm his reputation.

Rain in the Wind: Four Stories

A clever and strong-minded single woman, attempting to pursue a journalism career in a male-dominated environment, angers the leader of a new religion and the ruling political party with one of her editorials, in a whimsical portrait of contemporary Japan.

A Mature Woman

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