The Japanese Umbrella: and other stories

Description

Writing of Francis King's 1961 novel about contemporary Japan, The Custom House, Penelope Mortimer praised its `ferocious perception'. That widely-acclaimed book gave a view of the country which, in its revelation of the violence and brutality always present under a surface veneer of politeness and prettiness, was bound to shock and annoy many Japanophiles. This collection of short-stories, written in the two-year period following on the publication of The Custom House, shows that same penetrating insight into a civilisation in which politeness so often must do service for morality, but is at once blander and more affectionate in its approach. Francis King, who detested Japan when he first arrived there, left it five years later with regret and sadness; he himself became a Japanophile. These stories show his talents in all their richness: acid and unsparing to his fellow westerners in `A Sentimental Education' or `The Collectors'; dramatic in his handling of the clash between foreigner and Japanese in `The Crack' or `The Festival of the Dead'; humorously ironic in `A Corner of a Foreign Field'; macabre in `The Puppets'. Taken together the stories provide a picture of a country that is both remarkable in both extent and depth, and guarantee for the reader, like all Francis King's books, a compelling readability.

Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize,the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011. "One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov." Beryl Bainbridge

'These are wonderfully readable stories, and they have the characteristic quality of the first-class short story: they make the inevitable surprising.' Julian Jebb, The Sunday Times 'Mr King writes very well indeed.' The Times