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Light and Dark - A Novel (Hardcover)
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Light and Dark - A Novel (Hardcover)
Series: Weatherhead Books on Asia
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Light and Dark, Natsume Soseki's longest novel and masterpiece,
although unfinished, is a minutely observed study of
haute-bourgeois manners on the eve of World War I. It is also a
psychological portrait of a new marriage that achieves a depth and
exactitude of character revelation that had no precedent in Japan
at the time of its publication and has not been equaled since. With
Light and Dark, Soseki invented the modern Japanese novel.
Recovering in a clinic following surgery, thirty-year-old Tsuda
Yoshio receives visits from a procession of intimates: his
coquettish young wife, O-Nobu; his unsparing younger sister,
O-Hide, who blames O-Nobu's extravagance for her brother's
financial difficulties; his self-deprecating friend, Kobayashi, a
ne'er-do-well and troublemaker who might have stepped from the
pages of a Dostoevsky novel; and his employer's wife, Madam
Yoshikawa, a conniving meddler with a connection to Tsuda that is
unknown to the others. Divergent interests create friction among
this closely interrelated cast of characters that explodes into
scenes of jealousy, rancor, and recrimination that will astonish
Western readers conditioned to expect Japanese reticence. Released
from the clinic, Tsuda leaves Tokyo to continue his convalescence
at a hot-springs resort. For reasons of her own, Madam Yoshikawa
informs him that a woman who inhabits his dreams, Kiyoko, is
staying alone at the same inn, recovering from a miscarriage.
Dissuading O-Nobu from accompanying him, Tsuda travels to the spa,
a lengthy journey fraught with real and symbolic obstacles that
feels like a passage from one world to another. He encounters
Kiyoko, who attempts to avoid him, but finally manages a meeting
alone with her in her room. Soseki's final scene is a sublime
exercise in indirection that leaves Tsuda to "explain the meaning
of her smile."
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