Yamamoto, Michiko

Tokyo. 1983. Kodansha. 1st Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0870115650. Translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt. 152 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Amy Reichert. keywords: Literature Translated Japan Asia . FROM THE PUBLISHER - With her Australian husband and three fine sons around her, what more can Betty-san be looking for? How can she have the outward form of a life and yet, ultimately, emptiness? In the title story - a compelling fictional portrait of a Japanese war bride - Michiko Yamamoto delves deeply into the experience of foreignness. Her sparing yet vivid prose conveys the harshness of the Northern Territory landscape and climate as seen through Betty-san's eyes, her longing for the home on which she turned her back twenty years before, her desperate eagerness for the visits of Japanese fishing boats to port, and the poignant rewards of her own family. Beneath the exotic surface of her setting, the author uncovers personal truths which anyone who has ever felt foreign will recognize. equal insight, the story subtly and unsentimentally isolates the Japaneseness at its character's core. Its wide popularity culminated in the Akutagawa Prize for 1973. ‘Father Goose,' a shorter work set in Japan, features a recurrent theme of the author's: a lonely housewife's compensation for boredom by vicarious pleasure or pain. In Powers and Chair in the Rain, similar characters accompany their Japanese businessman husbands to Australia (as Michiko Yamamoto herself did for three years). Here, the suburbs of Darwin become the background for a different kind of alienation. one other short story by Michiko Yamamoto has been published in the anthology This Kind of Woman (Stanford University Press, 1982), this is the first volume of her work to appear in translation. inventory #7367 ISBN: 0870115650.