Floating cloud

by Fumiko Hayashi

THIS CLASSIC OF MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE WAS MADE INTO A FILM BY THE LEGENDARY DIRECTOR MIKIO NARUSEFirst edition in English.The title page "Floating Cloud (Ukigumo). By Fumiko Hayashi. Translated by Y. Koitabashi. Illustrated by Sho Tanaka".The title page incorrectly states that this work was "Originally Published in Japanese [in] 1953", in fact the original Japanese edition of this novel was published in 1951.The novelist Fumiko Hayashi (1904-1951) was also highly acclaimed as a poet and short story writer. Regarded by many as one of the most important Japanese novelists of the 20th Century, she was awarded an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Floating Cloud is a story of tormented love set in postwar Japan. Later made into a film by the Japanese director Mikio Naruse, Floating Cloud follows Yukiko's journey to Japanese occupied Indochina where she and Tomioka, a minor official, begin an affair. Returning back to the harsh realities of postwar Japan, Tomioka returns to his wife but is unable to break off his passionate, yet desperate relationship with Yukiko.

Paperback

Published January 1, 1957

About the author

Fumiko Hayashi (林 芙美子), December 31, 1903 or 1904 (Japanese sources disagree on the birth year) - June 28, 1951) was a Japanese novelist and poet.

When Hayashi was seven, her mother ran away with a manager of her common-law husband's store, and afterwards the three worked in Kyūshū as itinerant merchants. After graduating from high school in 1922, Hayashi moved to Tokyo with a lover and lived with several men until settling into marriage with the painter Rokubin Tezuka (手塚 緑敏?) in 1926.

Many of her works revolve around themes of free spirited women and troubled relationships. One of her best-known works is Hōrōki (translated into English as "Vagabond's Song" or "Vagabond's Diary") (放浪記, 1927), which was adapted into the anime Wandering Days. Another is her late novel Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1951), which was made into a movie by Mikio Naruse in 1955.

Hayashi's work is notable as well for its feminist themes. She was later to face criticism for accepting sponsored-trips by the Japanese military government to occupied China, from where she reported positively on Japanese administration.

Until the 1980s, "women's literature" (joryu bungaku) was considered a separate category from other modern Japanese literature. It was critically disparaged as popular but too sentimental. But Ericson's (1997) translations and analysis of the immensely popular Hōrōki and Suisen (Narcissus) suggest that Hayashi's appeal is rooted in the clarity with which she conveys the humanity not just of women, but also others on the underside of Japanese society.