Shadow of a Blue Cat

by Naoyuki II, Sophie Refle (Translator), Wayne P Lammers (Translator)

Overview

Businessman Yuki Yajima is fifty-one years old. He and his wife, Asako, are the parents of two daughters: Ryo, seventeen, and Yuka, an infant of only two months. Asking himself why he's allowed himself to become a father again at his age, Yuki begins to remember his uncle, who died quite young—younger, indeed, than Yuki is now. Thinking of this man, whom the young Yuki idolized, and who first introduced the boy to authors like Kenzaburo Oe and the Marquis de Sade, serves as a strange tipping point: allowing a sense of chaos and complexity back into his otherwise well-heeled life. A rare work of fiction focused simply on a man of integrity—a dying breed, in novels—"The Shadow of a Blue Cat" meticulously renders his life and opinions as Yuki tries to find a middle path between the radicalism of his uncle's life and the quiet bourgeois home he's worked so hard to build.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564786418
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	08/03/2011
Series:	Japanese Literature
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

After graduating from Keio University, "Naoyuki Ii" made his debut in 1983 with "Kusakanmuri" ("The Grass Radical"), which won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers.

Sophie Refle lives in Paris. Her major translations include Hiromi Kawakami's "To Drown" and Yu Miri's "The Fish that Swims to the Rock".

Raised in Japan, Wayne P. Lammers (Ph.D. in Japanese) taught at the university level. He was translation editor for Mangajin and is considered one of the finest translators of Japanese literature today.

Editorial Reviews

In this bittersweet and satisfying novel, 51-year-old Yuki Yajima contemplates the events that have led to his recently having become the father of a two-month-old, his unplanned second child born 17 years after his first daughter. Yuki, who has "a tendency to forget that institutions and laws are merely a thin outer shell covering the living bodies and myriad desires that lie underneath," revisits three main periods of his past: the summer in his teens when he visited his bachelor uncle; his early employed life alongside Ogita, a college friend who would later betray him; and the past year of his life, in which Yuki discovers that Ogita is dying of cancer and Yuki's teenage daughter starts hanging out with a guy Yuki doesn't approve of. As the narrative cycles through layers of time, what emerges is a ruminative and deliberate (some might call it slow) portrait of a man who does his best to think things through and forge ahead despite life's disappointments and curveballs. (July)

Publishers Weekly