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Seller's Description:
Tokyo. 1977. University Of Tokyo Press. 1st Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0860081966. Translated from the Japanese by Charles Dunn. 122 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature Translated Japan Asia. FROM THE PUBLISHER-Available for the first time in English translation are two best-selling stories by Takeshi Kaiko, a popular contemporary Japanese writer. The stories presented here deal with a theme often found in Kaiko's work-the plight of the individual struggling against the overwhelming pressures of the system. ‘Panic, ' written in 1957, relates the story of Shunsuke, a hardworking young bureaucrat, as he tries to steer his own course through a corrupt world of officialdom. An employee of the forestry department of a local government, Shunsuke predicts a plague of rats and submits a detailed report outlining countermeasures against the pending disaster. First the report is snubbed; then, when the plague becomes reality and the town begins to panic, Shunsuke's superiors react in stereotypically bungling bureaucratic fashion. ‘The Runaway, ' published two years after ‘Panic, ' is set in Ch'in China in the third century B.C., a brief peaceful period following unification of the country under the first emperor. The narrator, a Chinese peasant, is abruptly wrenched from his quiet life, one of hundreds of thousands of men conscripted into a ruthless corvEe system to build the Great Wall in an effort to keep out the barbaric Central Asian Hsiung-nu from the newly established empire. The historic events of the time are visible only in dim outline, as they affect the life of the narrator. Both ‘Panic, ' revealing modern man in his everyday situation, and ‘The Runaway, ' a historical novel of sustained imagination, are thoroughly good stories. inventory #4938.