この作家の郷里である紀州を舞台にのがれがたい血の宿命の中に閉じこめめれた、一青年の渇望と愛憎を、鮮烈な文体で描き出し、広く感動を呼んだ第74回芥川賞受賞作。 この小説は、著者独自の哀切な旋律を始めて文学として定着させた記念碑的作品とされ、広く感動を呼んだ。この作品では多くの登場人物が出てくるが、その多くは血縁関係のある人物であり、複雑に混ざり合った男女の性交の結果である。主人公はその複雑な血縁関係を恨み、父親を恨み、報復してやるのだと向かったのは妹の元であった。その憎たらしい父親の血は確かに自分の中に塊として存在していた・・・。表題作のほか、「火宅」「浄徳寺ツアー」など初期の力作三篇も収めている。
Author
See 中上 健次. Kenji Nakagami (中上健次 Nakagami Kenji, August 2, 1946 – August 12, 1992) was a Japanese novelist and essayist. He is well known as the first, and so far the only, post-war Japanese writer to identify himself publicly as a Burakumin, a member of one of Japan’s long-suffering outcaste groups. His works depict the intense life-experiences of men and women struggling to survive in a Burakumin community in western Japan. His most celebrated novels include “Misaki” (The Cape), which won the Akutagawa Prize in 1976, and “Karekinada” (The Sea of Withered Trees), which won both the Mainichi and Geijutsu Literary Prizes in 1977. During the 1980s Nakagami was an active and controversial figure in the Japanese literary world, and his work was the subject of much debate among scholars and literary critics. As one reviewer put it, "Nakagami was the first writer from the ghetto to make it into the mainstream and to attempt to tell other Japanese, however fictively or even fantastically, about life at the rough end of the economic miracle." Nakagami was at the height of his fame when he died, of kidney cancer, at the age of 46. (from Wikipedia)
