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Wayne P. Lammers

Junzō Shōno

Evening Clouds: A Novel (Rock Spring Collection of Japanese Literature) Paperback – April 1, 2000

by Junzo Shono (Author), Wayne P. Lammers (Translator)

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The most celebrated work by one of Japan's master literary stylists, Evening Clouds is a book filled with delicate images of ordinary life, richly and precisely observed. A family moves into a new home on a windswept hilltop in western Tokyo. Around them are forests and farms. But the developers are coming, and the children are growing up. There are meals, quandaries, conversations...Life appears comfortable and serene, yet Shōno's portrayal has a strange and evocative undercurrent, as the most minute details slowly resonate out through a universe that is changing and unforgiving. Evening Clouds combines the crafted naturalism of haiku with the Ozu-like clarity of film to produce a story that is wistful and real. Read Shōno slowly, a luxuriate in his vision.

Print length

222 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Stone Bridge Press
Publication date

April 1, 2000
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

1880656485
ISBN-13

978-1880656488
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This episodic novel, originally published in Japan in 1964 and appearing for the first time in translation, scrupulously observes one family's experiences getting used to a new home atop a windy hill near Tokyo. As the three children and their parents discuss the intricacies of buying a new desk, or deal with curious centipedes and residential developers who threaten to destroy the surrounding landscape, they accustom themselves to the trials of moving and the necessity of accepting change as the only constant in life. Each section revolves around the observations of father Oura, whose character is loosely based on Shono himself. Oura describes without embellishment even the most banal events of daily life, like grating yams for soup and the children preparing for their midterm exams. Such quaint aper?us of domestic routines, along with prolonged descriptions of harvesting gingko nuts and buying a sake vat, offer nothing but themselves. Shono's aim is to write about only what he has experienced, offering up placid slice-of-life realism. None of the vignettes, nor the novel itself, build to a climax or end in revelation. Simple, occasionally platitudinous conclusions are drawnA"there's no telling what you can learn by keeping your ears open"; "of all the things we come to know in this world, there is ultimately nothing that does not pass on." Shono's diary-like observations do not resonate or transcend the immediate narrative, but the quiet, innocuous narrative engages readers with details of Japanese domestic life. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This series of vignettes focusing on the fictional Oura family was originally serialized in a Japanese daily. A subtle collection of episodes, it gives readers a glimpse of the idyllic country life through the eyes of the Ouras, who have just moved from Tokyo to a small house atop a nearby mountainside. Shono treats us to the simple pleasures of making yam soup, catching dragonflies, eating ripe red pears, and transplanting wild flowers into the family garden, as each family member delights in a different aspect of nature. Shono's writing conveys the flavor of life lived fully and the peaceful stillness found when one is happy with where one is at any given moment. Not even an invasion of stinging centipedes, the threat of a typhoon, or an encroaching housing development farther down the mountain can spoil the Ouras' happiness. Writing in a simple, honest style, Shono uses the everyday details of rural life as metaphors for the growing love the Oura family members feel for one another. Bonnie Johnston
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Stone Bridge Press; First Edition (April 1, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 222 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1880656485
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1880656488
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,047,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #53,388 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #166,464 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
9 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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Crazy Fox

Family Ties on Tokyo's Outskirts

Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2006

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This is one of the most uneventful novels I've ever read. No drama, no storyline per se, no extraordinary characters, no deep symbolism to speak of, and devoid both of extreme emotional impact and pseudo-sophisticated postmodern detachment. Sounds boring, right? Wrong, strange to say. "Evening Clouds" consists of a number of loosely-related episodes that focus on the little day-to-day happenings in the life of a fairly ordinary family (okay, the father is a self-employed writer, so not exactly representative per se) narrated in a manner that, while straightforward and deceptively plain, is quiet, thoughtful, and engaging. At first the episodes and images seem random and disorganized, though with a little attention one catches on that most of them in some way or another suggest the family's transplantation to a new location and its gradual maturation there. Shono unfolds this theme according to organic rather than strictly linear organizing principles, and does so with an eye for detail and a knack for making the quotidian suggestive in a warm-hearted though unsentimental fashion, all of which slowly grows on the reader. It is almost as if Shono has taken the old abandoned prewar "I-novel" with its autobiographical fixation and confessional tone, subtracted out the weak points and hackneyed aspects (such as the impulse to drag oneself through the dirt), and refined it anew into a concoction of his own that actually is a joy to read and savor.

Lammers' translation is top-notch, catching the casual tones of the novel nicely, and the secondary materials he has appended to the work are short and to the point, doing a fine job of introducing this fine author and his novel to the English reader without impeding the novel from speaking for itself.

2 people found this helpful

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M. Ambastha

Beautiful!

Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2007

Verified Purchase

There are some books which stay with you after long you are done reading them and Shono's "Evening Clouds" is one of them. With haiku-like prose, and an almost Zen like approach, Shono narrates the day to day happenings in the life of Oura, a guy who moves to a new house on the top of a hill with his wife and 3 kids. The beauty of the book lies in the fact that while nothing really "happens", the reader can really connect with the family and feel life's rhythms in the written word.
This book is meant to be read slowly and savored without rush and haste.
Also, somehow after reading the book I felt that it gave me the same vibes as "My neighbor Totoro" by Miyazaki. I think that is because both are about families moving to a new house set among trees, wind and babbling brooks. And because both touch you in the same way, with the warm fuzzy feeling that I cannot begin to describe.

4 people found this helpful

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Delphine D.

A quiet masterpiece

Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2012

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I wish more books from this author were translated in English. I am thinking of learning Japanese to be able to read more for him. I always love when great authors digress from big adventures and great expectations to describe the life and thoughts of their heroes, and this book is all about that. You will see in the back the world evolving and the city growing, but inside the house the comments are the one to be expected from a family going along with progress -or not. I read this book 3 times in 5 years, and might read it again and again with pleasure.

One person found this helpful

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C. A. Morgan

Elegant, lyrical, and heart warming

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2015

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Elegant, lyrical, and heart warming, even though nothing much happens. There's a beautiful rhythm to the daily life of this family and their surroundings.

Helpful

James W. Fonseca

A Meditation on Family Life in Japan

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2020

Are you looking for a book that helps you slow down and find an inner calm? According to the introduction, this is that kind of book and I agree. These is no plot or drama. It’s an accounting of a period of time when the main character, a writer, and his family moved into a newly built house on the fringe of the Tokyo suburbs. A lot of the story is autobiographical. The author lived in the house described in this book written in 1964. He has a wife and three kids – two boys and a girl, just like the author in the story.

To paraphrase the blurbs and the introduction, this is a book about how we find a place in this world, how we shape it and how it shapes us. How we change the world and how we can’t anticipate how it will change. Time is both a ravager and a healer. There’s not a linear plot. It’s snapshots of their life with metaphors of gardening and dealing with nature.

It was a mistake to build a new house on the edge of the suburbs on a hilltop with no windbreak and a twenty-minute walk to a subway stop. And the main character realizes too late that it’s a risky site for thunderstorms and typhoons, so that’s a worry. We sympathize with him and his family as they watch the woods they loved and played in disappear around them to development, but of course, they started it.

The home environment is completely calm. It makes the setting of Leave it to Beaver look like chaos. Whether it is (was?) something in Japanese culture at that point in time, or just the peculiarities of that family, the children are remarkably docent. At most the father occasionally has to scold one of the boys to finish his homework, but he never raises his hand or even his voice to them. The girl is a perfect, bright, eager student and helpful daughter. The father’s control of the TV remote seems to be enough. (No computers yet.) The father reluctantly lets the boys watch Gunsmoke, Popeye and Disney cartoons, and he then becomes addicted to TV serials himself. If the father has any faults it’s that “he hasn’t gotten around to [fill in the blank] yet.”

The whole family is amazingly in touch with nature. We watch incidents with centipedes, dragon flies and snakes. When the forest is still there, the children take a different short-cut path every day through the woods to school. The boys delight in bringing wildflowers from the forest to their mother. They run to the encyclopedia to learn about every new bird or flower. The family keeps a diary marking dates of blossoming and the solstices. They create rituals, such as a citron bath at the time of a solstice.

We watch them go on a vacation to the beach where the mother and daughter collect types of seaweed for a school project. They go crazy over varieties of delicious local pears and collecting gingko nuts. The whole family pitches in to help the mother do the heavy work of grating yams for soup. There’s a story of coincidences that result in them acquiring a huge decorative antique vat. We hear of their appreciation of traditional Japanese pottery such as bizen and kutani.

A good example of the nature metaphor is when he is thinking of his mother, dying at the time, while he splits plant roots and thinks of how each plant carries the potential of re-creating the whole in it.

We are told that the fragments in the book form a whole – and isn’t that just like our lives?

The author (1921 - 2009) was a prolific writer – pretty much a book a year all his life - novels and collections of short stories and essays. He won many literary prizes and he was a visiting professor in the USA for a year. His work is considered instrumental in changing the nature of post-war literature in Japan.

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