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Tarō Azuma, an orphan of unclear background, is taken into care by Fumiko, a wealthy family’s maid. There he meets timid Yōko, the youngest child of the Utagawa’s family. The childish intimacy turns to be a decades-long fascination. Although he migrates and becomes one of the richest Japanese in the USA, while she stays in Japan, their fates are forever intertwined. The story of this obsessive love is then told by many characters and ultimately it becomes a novel written by a Japanese writer who lectures at one of the American universities.
Prawdziwa powieść (A True Novel) is a prose-mastery from one of the greatest writers of the Japanese literary world. Minae Mizumura is a genius stylist, and each of her work is an attempt to work out and retell a particular genre – here she undertakes the concept of a novel, questioning whether she, as a Japanese woman raised on the ground of the autobiographical I-novels, can create something that could be called true novel by European readers. And she did! Mizumura brilliantly set the story straight out of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë in a post-war Japan. In the background of the chaotic love affair we can observe a portrait of Japan entering a new era, fascinated by all Western. Our guide is Mizumura herself and that poses a question: Is True Novel really true?
