قصة الكتاب :
Shinchōsha, 2012. 136 pp. ¥1,200. ISBN 978-4-10-436303-2.
Ishii Shinji
Born in Osaka Prefecture in 1966. In 1996 issued the short story
collection Tōkyō Ishii aruki [Ishii’s Walks Through Tokyo], later
published as Tōkyō yawa [Tokyo Evening Tales]. Published his first
novel, Buranko-nori [The Swing Rider], in 2000. Won the Tsubota
Jōji Award for Mugifumi kūtsue [Kutze the Wheat Treader] in 2003.
In 2012 Aru ichinichi won him the Oda Sakunosuke Prize. His essay
collections include Ishii Shinji no gohan nikki [Ishii Shinji’s Food
Diary] and Kuma ni miete kuma ja nai [It Looks Like a Bear, but Isn’t].

Aru ichinichi reveals a new and entirely unexpected side to Ishii Shinji’s talent.
Until now, he has been known mostly for his surrealistic fantasies and fairy-tale
settings, but this story of a married couple—to all appearances, the author and his
wife—reads more like a conventional autobiographical novel. Even when he is
writing about ordinary everyday life, though, Ishii allows his imagination to wander
far afield. His reflections span the globe—from an eel spawning ground to the
Yaeyama Islands of Okinawa and Latin America—and the writing, full of mushrooms,
frogs, and other strange images, brings a touch of the surreal to its depictions
of the everyday world.
Ishii also writes about food in appetizing detail, providing masterful descriptions
of scenes in which the characters prepare and enjoy traditional Japanese
foods like matsutake mushrooms and hamo (pike conger).
The second half of the book is a dramatic account of the birth of the couple’s
child in a maternity hospital in Kyoto, where the wife is determined to give birth
naturally, even though she is having her first child at the age of forty-three. Although
childbirth is a basic part of life, it is a subject that is rarely addressed in
contemporary Japanese literature. In his imaginative depiction of the fetus just
before birth, as a living thing that moves and feels within the womb, Ishii transcends
the limitations of the documentary I-novel. This alone would be enough
to make his novel an important, groundbreaking achievement. (NM)