The Waiting Years Tapa blanda - 2002

FUMIKO ENCHI, the daughter of a famous scholar of the Japanese language, was born in Tokyo in 1905. Without completing her studies at the Girls' High School of the Japan Women's University, she left to study drama. Her first play, Banshun Soya, performed at the Tsukiji Little Theater, was a success. At twenty-five she married a journalist, but after the unhappy war period, when all her property was destroyed, she determined to concentrate entirely on writing in order to escape the oppression of domestic life. A short story published in 1952, Himojii Tsukihi, was acclaimed by the critics and won the coveted Women Writers Prize. With illness and the psychological stresses of middle age, her writing took on an acute realism which set it apart from the subdued tones of traditional Japanese writing. 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, and is now a member of the Art Academy.