Book Review:A Tale of False Fortunes

[sheem]

A Tale of False Fortunes

Author: Enchi Fumiko


Set in Japan at the end of the tenth centu ry, A Tale of False Fortunes (Namamiko mono-gatari) tells the story of Teishi, daughter of Fujiwara regent Michitaka, who is married as a girl to the young Emperor Ichijo. When Michitaka dies, power shifts within the fami ly: the dowager Empress prefers his brothers to his sons and the new regent Michinaga wants his own daughter to be empress. He uses devious means (including false spirit mediums) to try to undermine Teishi's posi tion, and lady-in-waiting Kureha and her lover, secretary of police Yukikuni, are caught up in his machinations.

The frame of A Tale of False Fortunes is complex. Writing in 1965, Enchi purports to be remem bering a now lost manuscript of her father's which she saw forty years earlier, a manuscript which "must have been a transcription of an older book from the Kamakura or Muromachi period, or possibly a fictional work by a not-so-famous literary scholar of the Tokugawa period". She mixes extracts from and paraphrases of that | imagined work with extracts from real works (notably the eleventh century "A Tale of Flowering Fortunes") and her own commen tary.

I thought this (filtered through the addi tional barrier of translation into English) might be difficult to follow, but it is actually accessible and engaging. A Tale of False Fortunes works both as a novel and as an introduction to a fascinating historical set ting. Roger Thomas contributes a useful introduction, but the only essential infra structure is a family tree, without which the relationships between the characters would be confusing.

[naz]

Thanks 4 sharing

[~*guria*~]

nice info

thnx 4 sharing