Marshland

Otohiko Kaga's Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, spanning from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo. His coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity, he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, gradually becoming drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikehata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train.

During their long imprisonment, the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial systems of Japan. At the end of their arduous pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here lies the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan, where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes.

Marshland is a revelation of modern Japanese history and culture, a major novel from the hand of a master well-known in his own country. Though it is only the second of his works to be translated into English, the wealth of Kaga's work in fiction remains to be discovered by the Anglophone world.