Masks
  • Published: 5 November 2019
  • ISBN: 9780099589440
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $27.99

Masks

Formats & editions
EBook
7 Nov 2019
Paperback
5 Nov 2019
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Fumiko Enchi was a well known female Japanese writer, whose work is often compared to Yukio Mishima. She won the big Japanese Literary prizes in the 1940s (the Noma & Tanizaki) and has never been published in the UK.

Published for the first time in the UK, one of Japan's greatest modern female writers

Ibuki loves widow Yasuko who is young, charming and sparkling with intelligence as well as beauty. His friend, Mikamé, desires her too but that is not the difficulty. What troubles Ibuki is the curious bond that has grown between Yasuko and her mother-in-law, Mieko, a handsome, cultivated yet jealous woman in her fifties, who is manipulating the relationship between Yasuko and the two men who love her.
  • Published: 5 November 2019
  • ISBN: 9780099589440
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $27.99
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About the author

Fumiko Enchi

Fumiko Enchi was the pen-name of Fumi Ueda, one of the most prominent Japanese women writers in the Showa period of Japan. Her first play, Banshun Soya, performed at the Tsukiji Little Theatre, was a success and a short story published in 1952, Himojii Tsukihi, was acclaimed by the critics and won the coveted Women Writers Prize.

On the publication in 1957 of The Waiting Years – a novel she took eight years to write – she won Japan’s highest literary award, the Noma Prize. Enchi was made a Person of Cultural Merit in 1979, and was awarded the Order of Culture by the Japanese government in 1985. She was elected to the Japan Art Academy shortly before her death in 1986.

Also by Fumiko Enchi

The Waiting Years
See all

Praise for Masks

Clear and powerful

Kirkus

An esoteric masterpiece

Yukio Mishima

A subtle examination of universal female behavior

People

[Enchi’s] allusions to the masks of No plays and to the classic The Tale of Genji, the brilliant way she layers and interweaves the ancient, the more recent past and the present are haunting and rich. A fictional enchantment

Publishers Weekly

Enchi’s writing has some of the same amniotic fluidity as Tolstoy’s, an almost bodily, floating immersion into the effortless habitat of the story

The American Reader