The House of Nire by Morio Kita (.ePUB)
File Size: 1.6 MB
The House of Nire by Morio Kita, Dennis Keene (translator)
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 1.6mb
Overview: The House of Nire will come as a surprise to readers who expect a Japanese novel to be a mixture of existential despair and sensitive portrayals of the obscurer aspects of human relations. This novel is unashamedly comic, and its vision of human life, although emphasizing the odd pointlessness of the everyday, is that of a warm humanism which accepts what the world is like and wastes no time in empty condemnation. The reader will feel himself in the company of a mind that understands with intelligence, judges with generosity, and richly, at times uproariously, laughs and enjoys.
The book relates the history of the Nire family from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second. We meet Kiichiro Nire, founder not only of the family mental hospital but of the family itself, for he has rejected his old name with its solidly rural implications and chosen a new, unique one for himself. Kiichiro, in all his vanity, selfishness and absurdity, is one of the great comic creations of Japanese literature, reminiscent as much of Dickens as of the author’s admired Thomas Mann. His children, adopted children, grandchildren, and any number of remarkable minor characters, adherents of the hospital in some way or other, fill the pages of this book, providing not only a novel unique in its inventiveness and richness, but a picture of actual Japanese people and life such as has never yet been available to the English-speaking world.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
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