2016年3月号は、作家、カズオ・イシグロ氏の作品についての文章です。
年度末ということもあって、実践ビジネス英語本編も新生活を思わせるトピックになっていますが、The Writers' Workshop は難しい文章が題材となりました。
主な理由は、500〜600字ほどの日本語の文章なのに、句点が6つしかないことです。どれも一文が長く、語順や接続詞の使い方に苦労しました。。"Although ..." で始めた文章があったのですが、Although の終わりまでが長過ぎて文意が取りづらくなったため、", but ..." へ変更したり、関係代名詞でうるさくならないように気をつけました。
カズオ・イシグロ氏の小説は読んだことが無いのですが、英文学ということで勉強も兼ねて読んでみたいなと思います。
It's a great pleasure for me that a writer Kazuo Ishiguro's root is Japan, whose new novel is longed for by many countries all over the world, not only Europe and America.
His mother tongue is not Japanese but English, because when he was young, he left Japan and went to a grammar school in England. Although he writes novels in English and he's a genuine English novelist, I've got interested in his work as a Japanese fan because the characters in his early works, "A Pale View of Hills" and "An Artist of Floating World" (1986) were very Japanese.
Because Japan, as the setting of a novel, probably had been described enough, following novels were set in Europe and Asia.
"The Remains of the Day" became a best seller, which won the Man Booker Prize and was later made into a movie directed by James Ivory and starring Anthony Hopkins.
That novel made a splash worldwide and he became popular as a full-length-novel writer whose novels were excellent literature and whose stories were so attractive that people could not stop reading them. He seemed to become a novelist who would write the virtue of the good old days in England in the setting of history, but from then, he has made great strides.
Readers were invited to a comfortable labyrinth by "The Unconsoled", which makes full use of experimental methods, and "When We were Orphans", which is a mystery novel in the setting of Shanghai and describes sorrow of a man who is trifled with by memory, something kaleidoscopic and vulnerable, and subsequently the world was surprised by "Never Let Me Go", which is regarded as one of his masterpieces.
