Koizumi Junichi, a shy country youth with literary ambitions, arrives in Tokyo and drifts through boarding houses, the novelist Oishi's circle, a lecture on Ibsen, and a night at the theatre. He is drawn into a dangerous fascination with the worldly Madame Sakai while trying to discover what he wants to write.
Books mentioned in Youth (8)
Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen: “"This is one side of Ibsen's self," he concluded, "the side of himself that he gave poetic expression in Peer Gynt, his worldly self." Then he said that Ibsen had, from the very beginning, another side to his self. [auto-translated]”
Brand by Henrik Ibsen: “Zola's Claude seeks art. Ibsen's Brand seeks the ideal. For the sake of what he seeks he sacrifices wife and child without a backward glance, and he is destroyed himself. [auto-translated]”
John Gabriel Borkman by Henrik Ibsen: “On the twenty-seventh of November, Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman was staged at the Yurakuza Theatre. [auto-translated]”
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Shakespeare and Goethe, however splendidly they are staged, can hardly strike today's young people with a painful immediacy. Goethe is the same: if Faust appeared as a new work, what would the young say? [auto-translated]”
The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck: “On the neatly cleared desk lay a copy of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird, left half-read when he went out. [auto-translated]”
La Multiple Splendeur by Émile Verhaeren: “I have read nearly all of Maeterlinck. Then, hearing that he was a friend from the same school, I started reading Verhaeren. Recently La Multiple Splendeur arrived, so I read it on the train when I left home. [auto-translated]”
Le Voleur by Henri Bernstein: “Once the train had started, Junichi opened his bag, searched through the wrapping cloth and took out a book with a blue cover like The Blue Bird's: Henry Bernstein's Le Voleur. He knew it was a worthless piece, but he had ordered it to see how a crowd-pleasing play is made. [auto-translated]”
Three Tales by Gustave Flaubert: “He had tried many forms for the legend: verse, prose, or the epic manner, in the style of one of Flaubert's Three Tales, and he had even thought of modelling it on one of Maeterlinck's short plays. [auto-translated]”