[ book tip by Incentives ] “Took the train to Miyajimaguchi, about an hour on the Sanyo line, in one of the carriages that have been in use for five or six decades.” We are in Japan, along with a protagonist who resembles the author but is not naively identical with him.
The prolific author Leopold Federmair was born in 1957 in Wels, Austria, and has lived for many years in Hiroshima, Japan, where he teaches German at the university. His latest novel, “Wandlungen des Prinzen Genji” (Prince Genji’s Transformations), is both reflective and reflexive. It explores life, literature, and Japan and revisits “Genji Monogatari”, a volume by the lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu (c. 978–c. 1014) that was the first novel written in Japanese. It is about love, and about the discovery of the world as seen through the eyes of a child, the narrator’s young daughter.
What makes this novel so distinctive is its formal organization. It is composed of a great many small chapters like the pieces of a mosaic. The frame story is the “The Tale of Prince Genji,” an erotic account of an aristocratic Lothario who becomes a hermit in his late forties. Federmair describes the bon vivant’s escapades as artfully as he superimposes his own contrasting dramatic arc on this all-encompassing literary work.
In fact, the seeming disparities of the novel’s loose composition conceal a more intricate weave of themes.
On the surface, the book explores Japan’s contemporary reality, traditions, and customs, describes the narrator’s impressions on his literary and physical excursions, and is peppered with keen observations and quiet reflections.
Yet under the surface the book grapples with longing and passion as it tells a love story between the protagonist and a woman named Murasaki, contemplating life’s transformation into literature, and its preservation in language. Fiction becomes entangled with reality, operating in a realm between cultures and within the characters’ minds. The world is encircled and pinned down by the author’s clever neologisms.

Abridged version of the review by Alexander Kluy, November 2014. English translation by Jake Schneider.
Full German text: http://www.literaturhaus.at/index.php?id=10492

[ book info ] Federmair, Leopold: Wandlungen des Prinzen Genji. (original language: German) Otto Müller Verlag, Salzburg, 2014 . ISBN: 978-3-70131222-1.