cover image Sachiko's Wedding

Sachiko's Wedding

Clive Collins. Marion Boyars Publishers, $21.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-7145-2910-3

The fact that Collins's almost unrelievedly dark second novel (following his praised The Foreign Husband ) carries both weight and conviction is testimony to his powerful if narrow vision of Japan. On the eve of her arranged marriage to a man she can never love, Sachiko relives the events of her life as they have led her inexorably to this bleak juncture. Daughter of a tyrannical father, the fried chicken king of Kyushu, and a cold mother, Sachiko is like some trapped animal twisting in a net. The net has been spun, however, not just by her immediate family but by centuries of tradition. First introduced to the ways of seduction by the young girl she is tutoring, Sachiko is passed from one man to another, two of them distinguished professors and one a man of perverted sexuality, meeting only one ``prince,'' who abandons her. As men use her, so she learns to use them, while still yearning for love. Through the compelling Sachiko, Collins not only savages women's role in Japanese society, but modern Japan itself: obsessed with money, eager to varnish the past, ``a people who live in a world of lies.'' The author teaches at Tokyo University. (Oct.)