A picture of shadow on an off-white cover

Title

Bolaño Collection Harukana Hoshi (Distant Star)

Author

Roberto Bolaño (author), SAITO Ayako (translator)

Size

184 pages, 127x188mm

Language

Japanese

Released

November 25, 2015

ISBN

9784560092668

Published by

Hakusuisha Publishing

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Harukana Hoshi

Japanese Page

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Is reading novels really that fun? Novels I’ve read before? Maybe ones with passage in textbooks...umm…let’s see…probably Natsume Soseki? — Conversation like this with my students make me bitterly aware that interest in novels is currently at its nadir. It is true that we can live without novels. I don’t deny that. The real world is full of more intrigues than you find in stories.
 
However, my counterargument is this: all those extraordinary events and heartbreaking news accounts are fragments of information that pass in flux. Some new things happen, attract your attention, and old ones will become blurred and be forgotten. Novels, especially when well-written, leave a long-lasting impression of what occurs in the story in your mind. For instance, a novel telling a story of a cruel criminal with descriptive accounts of the uncertainties lurking in the background will settle more deeply, like heavy lees, than the news passed along daily as fragmented information. Don’t you think? So, why don’t you give it a try?
 
This story that I translated will introduce you to the fascinating world of Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean novelist adept especially, in my view, at portraying the “evil.” He is talented at illustrating not only wicked people but the wickedness itself. His works became highly acclaimed after his premature death in 2003 at the age of 50, and now he is considered one of the most influential Latin American novelists in the world literature. His grand-scale novels The Savage Detectives and 2666 were translated into many languages including Japanese. The Japanese versions saw great success in spite of their length and led to the publication of the eight-volume Bolaño Collection. He is the third Latin American author to have a solo collection published in Japan, after Jorge Luis Borges and the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. Distant Star is one of his novellas included in the Collection, one that is condensed with Bolaño’s peculiar attractiveness.
 
The story is set in the 1970s’ Chile under the military regime. The main character is Carlos Wieder, an air force pilot who became known for writing poems in the sky. One side of him is of an avant-garde poet and the other is of a cold-blooded assassin. Being narrated from the point of view of a first-person “I” who first encountered Wieder in a college poetry workshop, the story reveals the dark side of the character as it unfolds to an unexpected climax. You find the history of violence in Latin America interwoven with the narrator’s memories of his adolescence. It is a horrifying but very sad story.
 
Bolaño is perhaps best known for his epic five-part novel 2666. In one part, he deals with the serial female sexual assault and homicide that took place in a Mexican town along the U.S. border. The theme is based on the actual murder cases that went on over a period of years from 1990s onward. It is hard to read the countless accounts of cruel murder scenes; it really makes you feel nauseous. Readers are compelled to think what it truly is, the Evil that lies behind these atrocious acts, as they read on and build up the lees of the story in their minds.
 
I recommend that young people have an experience of reading that stirs and makes their everyday lives uneasy, which, I hope, can be gained by being absorbed in the world of fiction.
 

(Written by Ayako Saitou, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2018)

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