Summary
"This tour-de-force is widely regarded as the quintessential post-WWII Japanese novel. A plan to kidnap a major corporation's CEO becomes an allegory for the alienation of the individual self, a mirror to modern-day Japanese identity. In 1995 in Tokyo, five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to... Full description
Summary: |
"This tour-de-force is widely regarded as the quintessential post-WWII Japanese novel. A plan to kidnap a major corporation's CEO becomes an allegory for the alienation of the individual self, a mirror to modern-day Japanese identity. In 1995 in Tokyo, five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on the horses. They have little in common except a disaffection with their lives. One is a poorly socialized but genius factory welder. One is a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder. One is an ethnically Korean banker who is tired of being ostracized for his race. One is a truck driver who struggles to make ends meet; he is also the harried single parent of a teenage girl with Down's syndrome. The fifth man, Monoi, a sixty-five-year-old drug store owner, is the one who brings them all together. Monoi has a hard past and a tragic present. He grew up in poverty during the war, and gave the best years of his life working for companies that didn't take care of him. Last summer, his only grandson was killed in a highly suspicious one-person car accident; shortly after, Monoi's son-in-law, the boy's father, a successful dentist, committed suicide after a correspondence with Hinode Beer Company, a huge conglomerate where his son had been interviewing. Snooping around, Monoi discovers a very strange chain of communication between his dead son-in-law and a blackmailer over a forgotten family secret. Monoi, alone in the world and intent on revenge, decides to put together a heist that will victimize the corporate behemoth that stole his family: he will kidnap Hinode's CEO and extract blood money from the corrupt financiers who back it. He enlists his four disaffected friends to help pull it off."--Provided by publisher. |
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Item Description: |
First published in Japanese under the title Redi jåokåa, 1997. |
Physical Description: |
576 pages ; 22 cm |
ISBN: |
9781616957018 1616957018 |
Author Notes: |
Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She has been awarded grants from English PEN and the NEA, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, and Fuminori Nakamura. She was the guest editor for the first Japan issue of Words Without Borders , and she maintains the databaseJapanese Literature in English. Marie Iida has served as an interpreter for the New York Times bestselling author Marie Kondo's Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Her nonfiction translations have appeared in Nang , MoMA Post , Eureka and over half a dozen monographs on contemporary Japanese artists and architects, including Yayoi Kusama, Toyo Ito, and Kenya Hara for Rizzoli New York. Marie currently writes a monthly column for Gentosha Plus about communicating in English as a native Japanese speaker. |