Rain in the Wind: Four Stories - Softcover

Saiichi Maruya (b. 1925) was a professor of English literature before deciding to become a fulltime writer some twenty years ago; he specialized in the twentieth-century novel, his Joyce research being famous. What probably most affected him as a writer, however, was the way the modern English novel could be serious in a light, entertaining manner. He has, for example, translated Graham Greene (among others), but not The Power and the Glory or The Heart of the Matter, but Loser Takes All and It's a Battlefield; i.e., "entertainments" His novel Singular Rebellion--described in The New York Times Book Review as "funny, light on its feet, and providing exceptional insight into the ways of the Japanese" was thus an act of rebellion itself when it first appeared in 1972, going against the mainstream of Japan's sombre, confessional modern literature. Even so, it won the prestigious Tanizaki Prize for that year, and he has since won most other available prizes, being now one of his country's most revered men of letters.

The translator: Dennis Keene, an English poet who has lived and taught in Japan for many years, is known for his distinguished translations of Maruya's Singular Rebellion and Morio Kita's The House of Nire, among other works of Japanese fiction.

[The following is taken from "Tree Shadows."]

I have always been attracted by the shadows of trees, though I would find it hard to explain why. Shadows cast on the ground arouse no particular emotion, even if I don't actually dislike them. It's the vertical shadow that moves me, especially a whole group of them thrown by an avenue of trees, thrown upon a wall. Something profound is stirred in me, a sense of the inconsolable, of some lost home to which I'll never return, yet apprehended with pleasure almost, a deep warmth. The wall itself has to be quite blank, preferably of a weak, negative colour; any form of pattern totally alters the effect. I particularly dislike buildings with lots of windows, surfaces of variegated brick, and am completely put off by those white lines left in concrete when repair work has been carried out. A blank, indifferent surface is best: a view of trees projecting their long shadows onto its wide emptiness seems to reaffirm for me the solitude of all created things, for what truly belongs to any object is only the shadow it casts.

Reflections in mirrors or in water move me little, although I've no great objection to them. Some might think it strange to consider both sets of images as the same type of thing, claiming that there's something quite different about the rich foliage of trees reflected, not in water but, for example, in the glass wall of a large building in the centre of the city, where the effect is of the trees actually growing there inside the building. But though I can see what they mean, I still have to admit that such images leave me fairly cold. What I require is the black pattern created by strong light held back by trees, and this can be sunlight or moonlight, or even the light of a street lamp; and since one can rarely see this cast over a wide, unpatterned surface, I've learnt to find pleasure in only a limited area of shadow, or even in something very faint thrown on a surface already confused by the artificial, multicoloured shadings of other objects.