Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Just finished reading The Twilight Years by Sawako Ariyoshi and thought I would put up some thoughts on it.

Ariyoshi is one of the Japanese authors I enjoy the most. Her style is unpretentious and unassuming and reminds me of the likes of Joseph Conrad. The Twilight Years is no exception to this. Set in post World War II Tokyo, it tells the story of a Japanese family as they deal with their ‘grandfathers’ senile dementia.

Published in the 1970’s this novel was a big hit in Japan selling in excess of 2 million copies. The period the novel focuses on is prior to this, and one of the central themes that the novel revolves around is the generational gap between those who experienced the war and those born after the defeat.

The main character is a woman by the name of Akiko who works as a typist at a Japanese law firm in Tokyo. She is married to a typical salaryman who has risen to a managerial level in a Japanese company and could almost be taken as the stereotypical image of a person in such a role at that time in Japanese history. He works a 6 day week and fails to understand the younger workers in his office - particularly in the way they do not feel obliged to wait for him to finish has work on Saturdays before they go home. Many of the workers in his generation were like this and it is still quite common even now.

They live with, when the novel opens, the husbands father and mother, as well as their son. This living arrangement is still common in Japan, especially rural areas, but not so common these days in the main centers such as Tokyo or Osaka. The passing away of the grandmother leads to Shigezo, the grand father losing his marbles so to speak and sets off the events that make up the novel.

Compared with Akiko, the husband had it easy. Uncommon as it was for a ‘housewife’ like Akiko to work during this period, societal pressures meant that she was also responsible for all of the household chores (which she squeezed into Saturday as much as possible in order to be able to enjoy one day off a week). Once grandpa went senile her workload increased dramatically, leading her almost to the point of collapse, and this is where the novel derives much of its force.

The level of description of such mundane things as meals, through to elaborate detail on such rituals as Buddhist funeral rites in Japan make for fascinating, if at times macabre reading, and the novel as a whole serves in many ways as a much better historical record of the period than any historian could pull off.

At a more human level the interaction of the characters, especially the main character Akiko with Shigezo is touching. I think one of the characteristics of great authors is the way they manage to convey a sense of trial, the moral dilemma, the great question that pulls the characters first one way, and then the other. Ariyoshi pulls that off with aplomb in The Twilight Years.

The Twilight Years is highly recommended if you are interested in Japanese history from a personal perspective, or if you just want an elegant read dealing with the trials and ‘dribulations’ of living with the elderly.

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