³Û¨°ì´Ç Ogawa () was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored ?An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics¡° with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.
A film in French, "L'Annulaire¡° (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko and Marc Barb¨¦, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals; the film, some of which is filmed in the Hamburg docks, is based in part on Ogawa's "Kusuriyubi no hy¨hon¡° (ËaÖ¸¤Î˜Ë±¾), translated into French as "L'Annulaire¡° (by Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle who has translated numerous works by Ogawa, as well as works by Akira Yoshimura and by Ranpo Edogawa, into French).
Kenzabur¨ ?e has said, '³Û¨°ì´Ç Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating.' The subtlety in part lies in the fact that Ogawa's characters often seem not to know why they are doing what they are doing. She works by accumulation of detail, a technique that is perhaps more successful in her shorter works; the slow pace of development in the longer works requires something of a deus ex machina to end them. The reader is presented with an acute description of what the protagonists, mostly but not always female, observe and feel and their somewhat alienated self-observations, some of which is a reflection of Japanese society and especially women's roles within in it. The tone of her works varies, across the works and sometimes within the longer works, from the surreal, through the grotesque and the--sometimes grotesquely--humorous, to the psychologically ambiguous and even disturbing.
Perfect room for a sick manYoko Ogawa (Japanese literature) 96 pages Translated by Bassam Rating: 3?
.Quote: "For this reason, I regretted so much for my brother's youth, and I have never before regretted this much for anyone, not my father, nor my mother, nor my husband, nor even myself.".
The Summary A short, dark novella that goes in two directions, one about the present and the story of her younger brother's illness and the conflicting feelings that brought the heroine together with him, and the other is a tape of memories in which she reviews the past of her family's turbulent and disjointed life and how she lost her family members one after the other.
But what does that have to do with the title of the novel? This is what you will get to know as you read it...
The last moments of parting with a dying patient may seem harsh, but at the same time, every second is precious because it is irreplaceable..
Evaluation:
Although I liked the idea and considered it influential, it sheds light, albeit in a slightly different way than usual, on the disjointed family relations and the loss of intimacy between its members and their consequences.
Unfortunately, I found it truncated at the end and superficial in some details that I would have liked to have elaborated on..Have you ever read this novel or any other novel by the author? Share your opinion.