Dark Pictures and Other Stories by Noma Hiroshi (.ePUB)
File Size: 1.6 MB
Dark Pictures and Other Stories by Noma Hiroshi, James Raeside (translator)
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 1.6mb
Overview: The three stories contained here are dark and haunting tales of young men whose universal desires and anxieties are overshadowed by memories of the brutality of World War II. The main characters are all young men who have lived through the war but have emerged far from unscathed. In “Dark Pictures,” probably the most famous of Noma Hiroshi’s stories, the protagonist thinks back to his last meeting with his university friends before they were all arrested. The “dark pictures” of the title refer to paintings and engravings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which the protagonist and his friends had viewed together. The miseries depicted in Bruegel’s work seem in retrospect to encapsulate all the miseries the main character has suffered since seeing his friends: persecution, self-doubt, sexual anxiety, warfare, imprisonment, bombardment, and the miseries of life in Japan after the defeat.
The other two stories are set in the postwar world of black marketeers and bombsites, but they too concern young men whose universal anxieties about sexual desires and their place in the world are overshadowed by memories of the brutality of war.
Influenced by symbolism and the techniques of European modernists, Noma’s writing will seem both familiar and eerie to Western readers. These translations offer for the first time the chance for English readers to appreciate the work of this difficult and haunting writer.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
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