The Waiting Years

Fumiko Enchi was a well known female Japanese writer, whose work is often compared to Yukio Mishima. She won the big Japanese Literary prizes in the 1940s (the Noma &amp; Tanizaki) and has never been published in the UK.

A prize-winning novel by one of Japan's most notable women authors

A subtle dissection of the attitudes of Japanese women

The author is a woman of great intelligence, profound psychological insight, and extraordinary sensitivity

Absorbing, sensitive, and utterly heartrending

Fumiko Enchi was the pen-name of Fumi Ueda, one of the most prominent Japanese women writers in the Showa period of Japan. Her first play,A Turbulent Night in Late Spring, performed at the Tsukiji Little Theatre, was a success and a short story published in 1952, Days of Hunger, was acclaimed by the critics and won the coveted Women Writers Prize. 
 
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. Enchi was made a Person of Cultural Merit in 1979, and was awarded the Order of Culture by the Japanese government in 1985. She was elected to the Japan Art Academy shortly before her death in 1986.

Published for the first time in the UK, one of Japan's greatest modern female writers 
 
In the late nineteenth century, Tomo, the faithful wife of a government official, is sent to Tokyo, where a heartbreaking task is awaiting her. From among hundreds of geishas and daughters offered up for sale by their families she must select a respectable young girl to become her husband’s new lover. Externally calm, but torn apart inside, Tomo dutifully begins the search for an official mistress. 
 
The Waiting Years was awarded Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Noma Prize.

Fumiko Enchi

A subtle examination of universal female behavior

[Enchi’s] allusions to the masks of No plays and to the classic The Tale of Genji, the brilliant way she layers and interweaves the ancient, the more recent past and the present are haunting and rich. A fictional enchantment

Enchi’s writing has some of the same amniotic fluidity as Tolstoy’s, an almost bodily, floating immersion into the effortless habitat of the story

Published for the first time in the UK, one of Japan's greatest modern female writers 
 
Ibuki loves widow Yasuko who is young, charming and sparkling with intelligence as well as beauty. His friend, Mikamé, desires her too but that is not the difficulty. What troubles Ibuki is the curious bond that has grown between Yasuko and her mother-in-law, Mieko, a handsome, cultivated yet jealous woman in her fifties, who is manipulating the relationship between Yasuko and the two men who love her.

Fumiko Enchi

Praise for Masks

Clear and powerful

An esoteric masterpiece

A subtle examination of universal female behavior

Clear and powerful

An esoteric masterpiece

A subtle examination of universal female behavior

Clear and powerful

An esoteric masterpiece

A subtle examination of universal female behavior

Books by Fumiko Enchi

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