Background
Yoshikichi Furui was born on November 19, 1937, in Tokyo, Japan. He has lived there almost all his life, except for a brief stay in Gifu prefecture, the home of his parents, during World War II.
7 Chome-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo City, Tokyo 113-8654, Japan
Yoshikichi Furui studied German literature at Tokyo University, earning both his undergraduate and master’s degrees there.
Yoshikichi Furui
Yoshikichi Furui
Yoshikichi Furui
Yoshikichi Furui
Yoshikichi Furui
Yoshikichi Furui
Yoshikichi Furui
Yoshikichi Furui
Yoshikichi Furui
(An astonishing artistic recreation of roiling mental land...)
An astonishing artistic recreation of roiling mental landscapes.
https://www.amazon.com/Ravine-Stories-Collection-Japanese-Literature/dp/1880656299/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Yoshikichi+Furui&qid=1575962555&s=digital-text&sr=8-3
1997
(This novel is a meditative exploration of the strange bor...)
This novel is a meditative exploration of the strange borderland around the inner experience of aging and approaching death. Yet, rather than follow a conventional plot, the novel develops by means of an intricate weaving together through time of key experiences of the narrator and his friends to build a compelling portrait of human experience. Those familiar with Furui's writings will find here a fascinating new development of earlier themes. White-haired Melody, a work by one of Japan's finest contemporary novelists writing at the height of his power, is not to be missed.
https://www.amazon.com/White-haired-Melody-Yoshikichi-Furui/dp/1929280467/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Yoshikichi+Furui&qid=1575962555&s=digital-text&sr=8-2
2008
古井 由吉
Yoshikichi Furui was born on November 19, 1937, in Tokyo, Japan. He has lived there almost all his life, except for a brief stay in Gifu prefecture, the home of his parents, during World War II.
Yoshikichi Furui studied German literature at Tokyo University, earning his undergraduate degree in 1960. His undergraduate thesis was on Franz Kafka. He remained at Tokyo University for graduate work for another two years, earning a Master of Arts in German literature in 1962.
After graduating in 1962, Yoshikichi Furui accepted a position at Kanazawa University where he taught German language and literature for 3 years. In 1968 he published his first short story, “Mokuyobi ni.” He subsequently moved to Rikkyo University in Tokyo where he remained as an assistant professor of German literature until the watershed year of 1970. In 1970 Furui resigned from his post as an assistant professor of German literature at Rikkyo University in Tokyo in order to write full-time.
The early 1970s was a period of rapid economic growth and cultural efflorescence. In the literary sphere, a new group of authors was emerging.
These authors differed notably from their predecessors because of their move away from the overt social and political commentary - particularity as directed against the system that supported Japan's involvement in World World War II - then common both in recent works of literature and as a measure by which literature was measured. Because this new group of authors turned their gaze from society to the individual, looking inward, engaging the fears and fantasies of an urban population beset by a crisis of identity in a time of rapid economic growth, they were called the "introverted generation."
In 1977, he published "Yoko: Tsumagomi," a novella that was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. Since then he has become a highly regarded writer in Japan. He has been categorized as a member of the “introverted generation,” according to William Ferguson in the New York Times Book Review, who described that generation as a group of writers who “portray troubled individuals caught between the demands of society and the horror of solitude.” In World Literature Today, Yoshio Iwamoto noted that these writers “chose to explore the inner world of ordinary people leading humdrum lives amid the flux of modern existence,” and added that Furui is the best example of this literary movement. Among his particular literary influences are the Austrian novelists Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, whose work he has translated into Japanese. Critic Erik R. Lofgren, in World Literature Today, adds that “The interplay between the quotidian and the surreal on a metaphorical level that is tire hallmark of Furui’s fiction... betrays his early interest in Franz Kafka.”
Although Furui has received many awards in Japan, most of his work has not been translated into English. However, in 1997, two collections of his work appeared in English. "Child of Darkness: Yoko and Other Stories" includes the novella, "Yoko," as well as two stories, “The Plain of Sorrows” and “The Doll.” "Yoko" tells the story of a woman battling mental illness; through her experiences, the reader sees that what most people call “sanity” may simply be blind obedience to social rules. “The Plain of Sorrows” contains the observations of a man who is dying of cancer, and who feels guilty because years before, he allowed his sister to commit suicide with her lover. In “The Doll,” a young woman tries to break away from her family but eventually realizes that without a connection to her family, she has lost a sense of identity. Lofgren commended the collection as “touchingly introspective, hauntingly stark, and compellingly readable in a disturbing way.” Ferguson praised the works’ “psychological and cultural density” and remarked that the accompanying notes by Donna George Storey, the book’s translator, help to clarify the stories.
The other collection in English, "Ravine and Other Stories," includes four stories, “Ravine,” “Grief Field,” “On Nakayama Hill,” and “The Bellwether.” In World Literature Today, Lofgren wrote that this collection and the previously translated works, though lamentably small compared to the volume of Furui’s work, is enough “to permit... a provocative glimpse into the literature of a master psychological craftsman.”
(This novel is a meditative exploration of the strange bor...)
2008(An astonishing artistic recreation of roiling mental land...)
1997Despite the fact that Furui has spent his whole life in the urban environment of Tokyo, his stories are often set in the countryside and feature city people who go to the country in search of the life-restoring qualities inherent in nature. The mountains are a particularly potent locale in Furui’s work, as are small villages set in mountainous country, where nature and humans encounter each other and “work out a settlement of their respective claims,” as Iwamoto wrote.
Furui’s characters are typically quiet, sensitive, and passive. “As if to underscore the fragile, easily interchangeable identities of the characters,” observed Iwamoto, “mixed identities, lookalikes, doubles, and doppelgangers often occur in Furui’s works.”
Furui’s style is notable for its ease and naturalness, “which is one with the very rhythms of his breathing,” Iwamoto wrote; he also noted that Furui’s language often rides along the boundaries between opposites: “life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, reality and dream, wakefulness and absentmindedness, objectivity and subjectivity, outer and inner.”