"Dark pictures" and other stories
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
"Dark pictures" and other stories
(Michigan monograph series in Japanese studies, no. 30)
Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2000
- : cloth
- : pbk
Available at 22 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Contents of Works
- Dark pictures
- The feeling of disintegration
- A red moon in her face
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The short stories that Noma Hiroshi produced in the years of confusion and self-questioning after World War II struck a deep response in his readers.
In the three stories contained here--""Dark Pictures,"" ""A Feeling of Disintegration,"" and ""A Red Moon in Her Face""--the main characters are all young men who have lived through the war but have emerged far from unscathed.
The ""dark pictures"" of the title refer to paintings and engravings by Brueghel, which the protagonist and his friends had viewed together. The miseries depicted in Brueghel's work seem in retrospect to encapsulate all the miseries the main character has suffered since seeing his friends: persecution, self-doubt, sexual anxiety, warfare, imprisonment, bombardment, and the miseries of life in Japan after the defeat.
The other two stories are set in the postwar world of black marketeers and bombsites, but they too concern young men whose universal anxieties about sexual desires and their place in the world are overshadowed by memories of the brutality of war.
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