YOSHIKICHI FURUI is one of Japan's leading literary authors of the last two decades. He received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1971 and the Yomiuri Literature Prize in 1990. MEREDITH MCKINNEY is a literary translator, a long-time resident of Kyoto who now lives in Australia.

ABOUT YOSHIKICHI FURUI

YOSHIKICHI FURUI was born in 1937 and in 1970 resigned his post as assistant professor of German literature at Rikkyo University in Tokyo to devote himself full-time to his career as a writer. In the following year his place in the literary world became assured with the publication of the novella Yoko, which was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.

Since then, Furui has had an almost cult following among his readers in Japan. He is an acknowledged master of the exploration of that "other" world which lies at the periphery of our "normal" reality as individuals, and his work inhabits the ambiguous borders of these two worlds. His writing likewise often stretches the conventional limits of language, investing words with an aura of added significance that at times lifts his work toward the domain of poetry. The intensity and power of his writing creates an extraordinary realm of experience that the reader comes to inhabit as completely as the bewildered protagonists. All Furui's works in some way circle in toward this same point from new and shifting perspectives, and the cumulative effect of reading them is the experience of being drawn in to explore ever more deeply the strange world that shadows and defines our normal waking life.

Of the four works collected in this book, three are stories and one, "The Bellwether," is a somewhat more discursive and essayistic treatment of a theme, weaving in elements of the Japanese zuihitsu (essay) and I-novel traditions. "The Bellwether" is from Furui's earliest collection, in 1974, and was written soon after his return to Tokyo following several years spent teaching German literature at Kanazawa University in western Japan. "Grief Field" was first published in 1976, and "Ravine" appeared in 1980. "On Nakayama Hill" won the coveted Kawabata Yasunari Prize in 1987. - Meredith McKinney, translator

Congratulations to Meredith McKinney, whose translation of Ravine and Other Stories by Yoshikichi Furui was awarded the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize by the Donald Keene Center at Columbia University in June 2000. Furui's stories are introspective and slightly askew views of Japanese society and human relations, and the task of translating them is enormously difficult and complex. Meredith's award is truly well deserved.

DEEP IN THE MOUNTAINS there is a voice, chanting holy sutras. Drawn by the sanctity of its timbre he wanders among the mountains, seeking, but the owner of the voice is nowhere to be found. When he returns half a year later, the voice is still faintly audible. This time he conducts a thorough search and discovers, at the bottom of a ravine, the meager whitened bones of a man who had hung himself from the cliff above by a hemp rope tied around his legs. A further three years pass, and still the chanting has not ceased. Marveling, he this time carefully investigates the skeleton and discovers that the tongue inside the skull remains unrotted, and is even now continuing to chant with unwavering devotion.

Lying rolled in my sleeping bag in the darkness of the little hiker's hut in the ravine, I recalled this old story of the uncanny voice that rose with the sound of the rushing water from the valley floor, a story I had heard in the classroom a good seventeen or eighteen years earlier and forgotten till that moment. It came back to me now, as a chill autumn rain came racing suddenly in from the mountain, beating at the branches of the forest, and shrouded the ravine where I lay in a sound that merged with the sound of the stream's rushing, till it was as if the rain was pouring upward, out of the earth. And it seemed to me then that, from beneath the almost paralyzed quietness that lay wrapped at the heart of the water's roar, the rich and lustrous weight of a chanting voice reverberated with an astonishing clarity. When I listened intently, there was in fact no single voice discernible. But now it seemed to me that the tumble of water noise in the ravine had instead begun to swell with the breaths of many different people. . . .

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