Kinshu: Autumn Brocade
(Kinshu)

ENGLISH / Roger K. Thomas 

RUSSIAN / Galina Dutkina 

Shinchosha (1982)

(1985) (pb)

 

Aki Hoshijima is touring northeast Japan with her handicapped son when she encounters her former husband Yasuaki Arima, whom she has divorced 10 years ago. They have coincidentally boarded the same gondola on a lift that rises from the Mount Zao dahlia garden to Dokkonuma swamp. The two present a sharp contrast. While Aki is elegantly groomed and garbed, Yasuaki is unshaven, his shirt and shoes dirty. He appears to have fallen quite low in the world.

Aki and Yasuaki had a lengthy courtship before marrying, but in the second year of their marriage, Yasuaki had attempted a forced double-suicide with a hostess from Kyoto's Gion entertainment district, from which only he emerged alive. Although Aki and Yasuaki still loved each other, Yasuaki applied for a divorce and Aki agreed to it. Yasuaki then resigned from his job at the company of Aki's father and began drowning his sorrows in alcohol while drifting from job to job. Aki got married again, to a university professor, but their married life is not happy. Although they finally were able to have a child, the child is congenitally handicapped, and Aki can not feel love for her husband, who is having an affair with one of his students.

Shaken by the coincidental reunion, Aki seeks to calm herself by writing Yasuaki a long letter describing her feelings at the time of the divorce along with the subsequent events of her life. Yasuaki responds with a letter explaining various things including his meeting with his murder-suicide partner, the events of the day of the murder-suicide, and the woman he has been cohabiting with since the divorce.

The continued two-way correspondence forms a romantic novel of love and resuscitation, gradually filling in the information gaps regarding the loneliness both Aki and Yasuaki have been living with.

 

GENRE : Popular fiction