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ナニカアル
昭和十七年、林芙美子は偽装病院船で南方へ向かった。陸軍の嘱託として文章で戦意高揚に努めよ、という命を受けて。ようやく辿り着いたボルネオ島で、新聞記者・斎藤謙太郎と再会する。年下の愛人との逢瀬に心を熱くする芙美子。だが、ここは楽園などではなかった――。戦争に翻弄される女流作家の生を狂おしく描く、桐野夏生の新たな代表作。島清恋愛文学賞、讀賣文学賞受賞。
Paperback Bunko
First published January 1, 2010
12 people want to read
About the author
Natsuo Kirino
96 books2,805 followersNATSUO KIRINO (桐野夏生), born in 1951 in Kanazawa (Ishikawa Prefecture) was an active and spirited child brought up between her two brothers, one being six years older and the other five years younger than her. Kirino's father, being an architect, took the family to many cities, and Kirino spent her youth in Sendai, Sapporo, and finally settled in Tokyo when she was fourteen, which is where she has been residing since. Kirino showed glimpses of her talent as a writer in her early stages—she was a child with great deal of curiosity, and also a child who could completely immerse herself in her own unique world of imagination.
After completing her law degree, Kirino worked in various fields before becoming a fictional writer; including scheduling and organizing films to be shown in a movie theater, and working as an editor and writer for a magazine publication. She got married to her present husband when she turned twenty-four, and began writing professionally, after giving birth to her daughter, at age thirty. However, it was not until Kirino was forty-one that she made her major debut. Since then, she has written thirteen full-length novels and three volumes of collective short stories, which are highly acclaimed for her intriguingly intelligent plot development and character portrayal, and her unique perspective of Japanese society after the collapse of the economic bubble.
Today, Kirino continues to enthusiastically write in a range of interesting genres. Her smash hit novel OUT (Kodansha, 1997) became the first work to be translated into English and other languages. OUT was also nominated for the 2004 MWA Edgar Allan Poe Award in the Best Novel Category, which made Kirino the first Japanese writer to be nominated for this major literary award. Her other works are now under way to be translated and published around the world.
After completing her law degree, Kirino worked in various fields before becoming a fictional writer; including scheduling and organizing films to be shown in a movie theater, and working as an editor and writer for a magazine publication. She got married to her present husband when she turned twenty-four, and began writing professionally, after giving birth to her daughter, at age thirty. However, it was not until Kirino was forty-one that she made her major debut. Since then, she has written thirteen full-length novels and three volumes of collective short stories, which are highly acclaimed for her intriguingly intelligent plot development and character portrayal, and her unique perspective of Japanese society after the collapse of the economic bubble.
Today, Kirino continues to enthusiastically write in a range of interesting genres. Her smash hit novel OUT (Kodansha, 1997) became the first work to be translated into English and other languages. OUT was also nominated for the 2004 MWA Edgar Allan Poe Award in the Best Novel Category, which made Kirino the first Japanese writer to be nominated for this major literary award. Her other works are now under way to be translated and published around the world.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 8, 2021
An old cliche about war states that it is long periods of boredom punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror. Based on recently discovered wartime notes written by novelist Fumiko Hayashi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumiko_...), "Nani ka Aru" reproduces this in the form of a war memior that opens a window on the relationships between journalists, novelists and the Japanese war propaganda bureau.
This review is of the 2010 Japanese pocketbook edition.
In "Nani ka Aru," Hayashi records her memiors during a short span in June of 1943. She has just returned from an eight-month stint in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Conscripted by the Japanese military government together with other women writers, Hayashi's assignment was to write positive reports about life in its occupied territories. Prohibited from keeping notes, Hayashi put her recollections on paper while they are still fresh.
Intended to be complete recollections, portions of "Nani ka Aru" are sometimes painfully detailed, such as a recounting of all of members of her contingent of writers together with their affiliations.
Hayashi is a free spirit not all that troubled by rumors of her extramarital affairs. In a 1937 stint as a Mainichi reporter following the Japanese invasion of Wuhan, she jumps to the Asahi Shimbun and discovers a taste for being on the front lines in battle. The heart of the novel is her love for Kentaro Saito, a reporter for the Mainichi Shimbun. But this isn't clear in the early chapters.
The title "Nani ka Aru" poses a riddle about the unfolding story. Directly translated as "Something is There," the reader suspects some form of mystery to be uncovered. This hook is set by an early scene set at a stadium in which a stranger tells her that the playing ground hides a mass grave of overseas Chinese who were massacred by the Japanese military. Later in the novel an alternate translation of the title becomes apparent, "Something Alcoholic." Hayashi's lover Saito has decended into alcoholism. Here, instead of being the verb "to be," 'aru' is an abbreviation of 'arukohru' meaning 'alcohol.' The reason for his alcoholism, the real plot of the novel, and Hayashi's main role in Japan's propaganda machinery then begin to reveal themselves. The final chapter is an eyebrow raiser in which Hayashi resumes her free spirited life in wartime Japan.
This review is of the 2010 Japanese pocketbook edition.
In "Nani ka Aru," Hayashi records her memiors during a short span in June of 1943. She has just returned from an eight-month stint in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. Conscripted by the Japanese military government together with other women writers, Hayashi's assignment was to write positive reports about life in its occupied territories. Prohibited from keeping notes, Hayashi put her recollections on paper while they are still fresh.
Intended to be complete recollections, portions of "Nani ka Aru" are sometimes painfully detailed, such as a recounting of all of members of her contingent of writers together with their affiliations.
Hayashi is a free spirit not all that troubled by rumors of her extramarital affairs. In a 1937 stint as a Mainichi reporter following the Japanese invasion of Wuhan, she jumps to the Asahi Shimbun and discovers a taste for being on the front lines in battle. The heart of the novel is her love for Kentaro Saito, a reporter for the Mainichi Shimbun. But this isn't clear in the early chapters.
The title "Nani ka Aru" poses a riddle about the unfolding story. Directly translated as "Something is There," the reader suspects some form of mystery to be uncovered. This hook is set by an early scene set at a stadium in which a stranger tells her that the playing ground hides a mass grave of overseas Chinese who were massacred by the Japanese military. Later in the novel an alternate translation of the title becomes apparent, "Something Alcoholic." Hayashi's lover Saito has decended into alcoholism. Here, instead of being the verb "to be," 'aru' is an abbreviation of 'arukohru' meaning 'alcohol.' The reason for his alcoholism, the real plot of the novel, and Hayashi's main role in Japan's propaganda machinery then begin to reveal themselves. The final chapter is an eyebrow raiser in which Hayashi resumes her free spirited life in wartime Japan.
Displaying 1 of 1 review