EVENING CLOUDS
by Junzo Shono
translated from the Japanese by Wayne P. Lammers
Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2000.

From the Introduction

When Evening Clouds by Japanese author Junzo Shono (1921-) first appeared as Yube no Kumo in 1964, it created quite a stir in Japanese literary circles, and one critic later noted that the ensuing literary discussions had redrawn the map of postwar literature. As occurs with almost every such literary work, the novel has receded more into the background over the intervening decades as critics have turned to the new sensations of each new era. But Evening Clouds remains a quiet masterpiece, destined, I believe, to outlive numerous other works that have gained more attention in recent years.

Those who have read my earlier translation of selected short works by Shono, Still Life and Other Stories (Stone Bridge Press, 1992), will find a great deal that is familiar here. There is, for example, the elegant simplicity of Shono's trademark style, as well as the makeup of the family Shono portrays--father, mother, daughter, and two sons--and the constant interplay between the events of the present and the father's memories, observations, and musings about events from the past. But the novel-length Evening Clouds is on a scale that makes possible the development of more complex and intricately connected themes, and while Shono still focuses on small fragments, or "snapshots," of everyday life, each of the fragments in Evening Clouds is more sustained and is closely integrated with the others to form a unified whole.

Despite this greater unity, the story Shono tells in Evening Clouds is not laid out in a conventional plot involving conflict, development, and climactic resolution; it is not a story in which the author leads the reader by the hand, playing on his or her emotions to create suspense and a headlong rush to the finish. The story emerges instead from the interplay between the events of the present and the often meandering ruminations of the main character, Oura, as he observes those events or takes part in them, and it very much requires the participation of the reader in piecing the story together out of suggestion, metaphor, and a succession of episodes that carry the force of parables...

Even without being told, the nature of what Shono describes and his manner of describing it would, I believe, lead most experienced readers to suspect he is writing autobiographically. The family of five in Evening Clouds (as well as in a career-long series of other stories about the same family under different names) is in fact modeled on Shono's own, and the events he describes are based closely on his family's real-life experiences. While we cannot know how often he may tailor details--i.e., fictionalize them--to fit his thematic purpose, every detail he provides has the ring of authenticity; everything about his narrative suggests that Shono is faithfully recording events exactly as he experienced them, and that the exceptions to this rule, if any, are extremely few. Shono has spoken of all literature as being a ﾒhuman document,ﾓ using the English term. Although he does not mean by this that all literature should be of a documentary nature, that has indeed been an enduring characteristic of his own writing...

It is a tribute to the authenticity of Shono's record, and to the lightness of his touch in remolding events to his own design, that the result is both a vivid and true picture of a single Japanese family in early 1960s Japan and a timeless, placeless tale of Everyman and Everywoman that can resonate for readers of any generation the world over. Evening Clouds is not a closed book, but an open one. Different readers, especially those of different cultures, will find themselves deliberating on different passages and discovering different truths as they watch the members of this Japanese family putting down new roots, growing up, being buffeted by relentless winds and violent thunderstorms, slowly losing their sylvan landscape to the inexorable sweep of human progress, and transplanting a small portion of what is being displaced into their own back yard as a memento of what they once had.

According to one of his literary friends, Shono hit on the title for this work as he was lying on the grass gazing up at the sky one evening, watching a succession of beautiful colors transform the clouds overhead in a continuously changing display. Indeed, this is a story about gazing at the changing sky and watching the trees grow; about experiencing each day to the fullest, not as a series of mechanical routines but as a work of wonder that merges the past with the present and with the future. Read it in that spirit, and it may be just the antidote you need for the high-stress, hyperdrive pace of the age we live in.

Top|Back to "My Books"

TABLE OF CONTENTS(click on 1, and 11 to read excerpts)

1. Bush Clover
2. End and Beginning
3. On Top of the Piano
4. The Coyote's Lament
5. Sweet Olive
6. The Great Vat
7. Centipedes
8. Sasanquas
9. Knob Sticks
10. Yams
11. The Thunderstorm
12. Final Exams
    
13. Oriental Orchid