Masks

by Fumiko Enchi

Overview

'Clear and powerful' (Kirkus), Masks is perhaps Fumiko Enchi's finest work and her first to be translated into English. In this stunning and subtle novel about seduction and infidelity in latter-day Japan and about the destructive force of feminine jealousy and resentment, Mieko Togano, a handsome and cultivated woman in her 50s, manipulates--for her own bizarre purposes--the relationship between her widowed daughter-in-law, Yasuko, and the two men in love with her.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101970638
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/17/2015
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	328 KB

About the Author

FUMIKO ENCHI was born in Tokyo in 1905, the daughter of the great Meiji scholar Ueda Mannen. She is the author of many novels and stories, and has produced a ten-volume translation of The Take of Genji into modern Japanese. Masks was first published in Japan in 1958.

Editorial Reviews

A subtle examination of universal female behavior.” —People

“[Enchi’s] allusions to the masks of Nō plays and to the classic The Tale of Genji, the brilliant way she layers and interweaves the ancient, the more recent past and the present are haunting and rich. A fictional enchantment.” —Publishers Weekly

“Enchi’s writing has some of the same amniotic fluidity as Tolstoy’s, an almost bodily, floating immersion into the effortless habitat of the story.” —The American Reader

“Clear and powerful.... Almost imperceptively woven.” —Kirkus

From the Publisher