Search results for ""Author Ralph McCarthy""

In this gloriously over-the-top tale, Aoyama, a widower who has lived alone with his son ever since his wife died seven years before, finally decides it is time to remarry. Since Aoyama is a bit rusty when it comes to dating, a filmmaker friend proposes that, in order to attract the perfect wife, they do a casting call for a movie they don’t intend to produce. As the résumés pile up, only one of the applicants catches Aoyama’s attention—Yamasaki Asami—a striking young former ballerina with a mysterious past. Blinded by his instant and total infatuation, Aoyama is too late in discovering that she is a far cry from the innocent young woman he imagines her to be. The novel’s fast-paced, thriller conclusion doesn’t spare the reader as Yamasaki takes off her angelic mask and reveals what lies beneath.

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Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists at work today. This extraordinary text tells the story of her life and remarkable career in her own words. 'I am deeply terrified by the obsessions crawling over my body, whether they come from within me or from outside. I fluctuate between feelings of reality and unreality. I, myself, delight in my obsessions.' Infinity Net reveals Yayoi Kusama as a fascinating figure and maverick artist who channels her obsessive neuroses into an art that transcends cultural barriers. Kusama describes the decade she spent in New York, first as a poverty-stricken artist and later as the doyenne of an alternative counter-cultural scene. She provides a frank and touching account of her relationships with key art-world figures, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd and the reclusive Joseph Cornell, with whom Kusama forged a close bond. In candid terms she describes her childhood and the first appearance of the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life. Returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she resides to the present day, emerging to dedicate herself with seemingly endless vigour to her art and her writing. This remarkable autobiography provides a powerful insight into a unique artistic mind, haunted by fears and phobias yet determined to maintain her position at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde.

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"Art dies the moment it acquires authority." So said Japan's quintessential rebel writer Osamu Dazai, who, disgusted with the hypocrisy of every kind of establishment, from the nation's obsolete aristocracy to its posturing, warmongering generals, went his own way, even when that meant his death—and the death of others. Faced with pressure to conform, he declared his individuality to the world—in all its self-involved, self-conscious and self-hating glory. "Art", he wrote, "is 'I'." In these short stories, collected and translated by Ralph McCarthy, we can see just how closely Dazai's life mirrored his art and vice versa, as the writer/narrator falls from grace, rises to fame and falls again. Addiction, debt, shame and despair dogged Dazai until his self-inflicted death and yet despite all the lies and deception he resorted to in life, there is an almost fanatical honesty to his writing. And that has made him a hero to generations of readers who see laid bare, in his works, the painful, impossible contradictions inherent in the universal commandment of social life—fit in and do as you are told—as well as the possibility, however desperate, of defiance. Long out of print, these stories will be a revelation to the legions of new fans of No Longer Human, The Setting Sun and The Flowers of Buffoonery.

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Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai's genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew. "Everything's gone," the father explains to his daughter: "Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Ogigari house, the Chino house, they all burned up," "Yeah, they all burned up," she said, still smiling. "One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji," another autobiographical tale, is much more comic: Dazai finds himself unable to escape the famous views, the beauty once immortalized by Hokusai and now reduced to a cliche. In the end, young girls torment him by pressing him into taking their photo before the famous peak: "Goodbye," he hisses through his teeth, "Mount Fuji. Thanks for everything. Click." And the final story is "Villon's Wife," a small masterpiece, which relates the awakening to power of a drunkard's wife. She transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything, not by her husband being a thief, a megalomaniacal writer, and a wastrel. Single-handedly, she saves the day by concluding that "There's nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive."

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An ambitious, epic dystopian novel - part political thriller and part satire. From the Fatherland, with Love is set in an alternative, dystopian present in which the dollar has collapsed and Japan's economy has fallen along with it. The North Korean government, sensing an opportunity, sends a fleet of rebels in the first land invasion that Japan has ever faced. Japan can't cope with the surprise onslaught of Operation From the Fatherland, with Love . But the terrorist Ishihara and his band of renegade youths - once dedicated to upsetting the Japanese government - turn their deadly attention to the North Korean threat. They will not allow Fukuoka to fall without a fight. Epic in scale, From the Fatherland, with Love is laced throughout with Murakami's characteristically savage violence. It's both a satisfying thriller and a completely mad, over-the-top novel like few others. Translated by Ralph McCarthy, Charles De Wolf and Ginny Tapley Takemori, and published by Pushkin Press 'A troubled meditation on the soul of modern Japan... Alarmingly pertinent in light of current British politics... A morbidly funny comedy... Above all, it is a phenomenal feat of storytelling 700 pages, dozens of characters and scores of ideas woven into one gripping whole.' Andrzej Lukowski, Metro 'This is a novel by the other Murakami. Not Haruki... If Haruki is The Beatles of Japanese literature, Ryu is its Rolling Stones... [From the Fatherland, with Love] has a Tolstoyan cast of characters, from crack North Korean commandos and hapless Japanese bureaucrats to a gang of hoodlums who eventually decide to save Japan. It unfolds with the pace of a thriller...' David Pilling, Financial TImes 'Massively ambitious and uncompromising... prescient in unexpected ways' Joanne Hayden, Sunday Business Post ''[Mixes] the thrills of a spy novel with some national soul-searching' Lionel Barber, Financial Times, Summer Books 'Definitely edgier and darker than Haruki [Ryu Murakami] has a worldwide following and is regarded by many as one of the most thrilling writers of contemporary Japanese fiction... [He] offers a thrilling insight - with a geopolitical panoramic view - into national character, human relationships, chaos and disorder' - Tatevik Sargsyan, Hunger Magazine 'Like nothing else out there... a Japanese Tarantino... Highly addictive' Morpheus Tales Born in 1952 in Nagasaki prefecture, Ryu Murakami is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese literature. Awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1976 for his first book, a novel about a group of young people drowned in sex and drugs, he has gone on to explore with cinematic intensity the themes of violence and technology in contemporary Japanese society. His novels include Coin Locker Babies, Sixty-Nine, Popular Hits of the Showa Era, Audition and In the Miso Soup. Murakami is also a screenwriter and a director; his films include Tokyo Decadence, Audition and Because of You.

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