“Confessions is an important text because it explores a different psycho-social landscape, it works within a Buddhist sensibility, a Japanese aesthetic, and places the Filipino novel on unfamiliar grounds: an Asian tradition. Philippine tradition as a mixture of folk belief, Roman Catholicism, and Spanish and American influences seems to have developed apart from major Asian religious and philosophical traditions. It is this other Asian tradition that Daniel, the novel’s protagonist, encounters in his visit to Japan. During his visit, he learns about Filipino contract workers, the Japayuki, the pleasure girls imported from other Asian countries. He witnesses the exploitation of these workers. At the same time and quite at odds with social reality, Daniel has an aesthetic pursuit: he is fascinated by the life and work of Osamu Dazai, an early twentieth-century Japanese writer. His fascination with Dazai, who committed suicide by throwing himself into the Tokyo River, leads him to recreate a Japanese writer’s sensibility.” TOMAS N. SANTOS in Philippine Studies
Author
Eric T. Gamalinda is a poet, a fictionist and an essayist. He took undergraduate courses at the UST for three years and the UP for a semester. He was a local fellow for poetry of the UP ICW in 1983. In 1990, he went to Great Britain to represent the Philippines in the Cambridge International Writers’ Conference and to attend the Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat in Scotland, 1991. he got a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy. He participated in the Japan International Cooperation Agency’s Programme for the 21st century. He currently works with the Center for Investigative Journalism. Gamalinda’s poems are collected in Fire Poem/Rain Poem (1976) and Lyrics From a Dead Language (1991). His stories have been gathered in Peripheral Vision (1992). His first novel, Planet Waves (1989), was set during the turbulent Martial Law era. A second novel, Confessions of a Volcano (1990), was written after a visit to Japan, and explores the differences between Filipino and Japanese consciousness. A third novel, The Empire of Memory (1992), is set against the momentous events before, during, and after the EDSA revolt. Two of Gamalinda’s poetry collections won prizes in the Palanca. Ara Vos Prec won in 1985, while Patria y Muerte won in 1988. He also won Palanca awards for: Anatomy of a Passionate Derangement, a one-act play in 1980, "Mourning and Weeping in this Valley of Tears," a short story in 1988, and "The Unbearable Lightness of EDSA," an essay in 1990. His novel, Planet Waves received the National Book Award for fiction from the Manila Critics Circle in 1989. (Source here.)
