Best Novellas – American Hijiki & Grave of the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 4.15 MB
Overview: Two short stories, "Grave of the Fireflies" and "American Hijiki", came out in 1967 and were jointly awarded the prestigious Naoki literary prize the following year. Hijiki is an edible seaweed; in grated form it slightly resembles Western black tea and was the object of an illustrative cultural misunderstanding in the story, set during a contemporary visit of some Americans. Nosaka used the setting for a cutting and sordid take on "don’t mention the war". None of the film adaptations of Nosaka’s work give any hint as to the raw syntactic chaos of his writing. "Stream of consciousness" would hardly describe it: he uses full stops not so much as a way to end a sentence, but to conclude a train of thought – and some of his "thoughts" run on for pages. Throughout his career, he was a prominent raconteur on television, always wearing his trademark dark glasses. The obscenity trial of a publication he edited brought much attention, which snowballed as famous writers queued to be witnesses in his defence. Partly to offer a critique of the "poor literary style" of the judge’s verdict, Nosaka stood for election twice for the Upper House of the Diet, the second time successfully, and once, unsuccessfully, for the Lower House. Throwing a punch at the film director Nagisa Oshima during a wedding reception also kept him in the public eye. Perhaps his career as a popular ballad singer is most remarkable for its late start. "Grave of the Fireflies" was strongly autobiographical – and Nosaka continued to reflect on his wartime experiences in a series of writings that recalled witnessing burnt-out corpses, and seeing many, including his infant sister, die of starvation. Over the years, it emerged that "Grave of the Fireflies" was only a first attempt at recovering suppressed memory. Nosaka has described his path as circling incessantly around a vortex – and literary critic Setsuji Shimizu has likened this circling to that of a vulture circling his own memory. Nosaka was born in Kamakura (near Tokyo) in 1930, but his mother died soon after giving birth and Nosaka was adopted by an aunt in Kobe (far to the west), whom he believed to be his mother. Nosaka’s father did not maintain contact, and remarried.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics Wartime Short Stories
Download Instructions:
ZippyShare
MediaFire
