Kishimoto, a widowed writer left with four children, flees to Paris and then wartime Limoges to escape his love affair with his niece Setsuko. Back in Tokyo the bond resumes, a child is born, and he finally publishes a confession that breaks with his elder brother and tries to make a fresh start.
Books mentioned in A New Life (6)
The Analects by Confucius: “Before he studied school books, he had learned a three-character primer his father wrote out himself, and once he went to the village school his father taught him to recite the Great Learning and the Analects aloud. [auto-translated]”
The Great Learning by Zengzi: “Before he studied school books, he had learned a three-character primer his father wrote out himself, and once he went to the village school his father taught him to recite the Great Learning and the Analects aloud. [auto-translated]”
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: “From the war before his eyes, Kishimoto began to read the hearts of the people moving within it. Like Vronsky's departure at the end of Anna Karenina, he could easily imagine young Frenchmen going willingly to the front to save themselves. [auto-translated]”
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: “The tercentenary of Cervantes was being marked, and in the bookshop windows new works commemorated the famous Spanish author who wrote Don Quixote. For a man devoted to letters like Kishimoto, walking past those windows made him feel all the more a traveler. [auto-translated]”
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “We are happy, aren't we? In Rousseau's Confessions, which you gave me, there is a passage saying that true happiness cannot be told, only felt, and that the less it can be put into words the more deeply it is felt. How true that is. [auto-translated]”
The Murasaki Shikibu Diary by Murasaki Shikibu: “The mademoiselle, a pure Frenchwoman who had gone to Japan out of love for it and now lived in Tokyo, could already speak a good deal of Japanese and read something like Murasaki Shikibu's diary. [auto-translated]”
Books that mention A New Life (2)
A Fool's Life by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: “Even Rousseau's Confessions was full of heroic lies, and as for Shinsei, he had never met a more cunning hypocrite than its hero. [auto-translated]”
Words of a Pygmy by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: “After reading Shinsei: did a "new life" ever really come? [auto-translated]”