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Translated from the Japanese by Mark Williams
In the early 1950s Shusaku Endo spent several years as
an exchange student studying in Paris. Around him existentialism,
Sartre and Beckett were making the city the literary and philosophical
capital of the world. But for Endo the experience was deeply
alienating and he came away infected with tuberculosis, his
studies incomplete and convinced that there could be no cultural
commerce between East and West. Foreign Studies consists
of three linked narratives exploring this theme.
The first part, ‘A Summer in Rouen’, concerns Kudo,
a Japanese student invited to France in the 1950s. It is a
lucent snapshot of a young man who feels adrift in a Western
country. The second part, ‘Araki Thomas’, sees Endo
on familiar territory as he tells of an apostate Japanese
Catholic who has visited seventeenth-century Rome. ‘And
You, Too’, the third part, is the story of Tanaka, a
Japanese scholar of French literature who visits France in
the 1960s to research the life and work of the Marquis de
Sade. We soon come to see that Tanaka’s quest is not
simply a literary one but spiritual and cultural too.
‘An immaculate, limpid moral tale, beautifully translated
into English.’ – Financial Times
‘Endo has the major novelist’s genius for making
out of his own and his culture’s predicaments works
of art of wholly universal relevance.’ – Paul
Binding, European
‘There is nothing superfluous in Endo’s writing;
everything imparts meaning, reinforcing the central theme,
giving more subtle shading to the whole. Foreign Studies is
quite brilliant.’ – Scotland on Sunday
SHUSAKU ENDO (1923 – 96) is widely regarded
as one of the greatest Japanese authors of the late twentieth
century. He has won many major literary awards and was nominated
for the Novel Prize several times. His novels, which have
been translated into twenty-eight languages, include Silence, The
Sea and Poison, Deep River, Scandal and
The Samurai. |
