The Waiting Years

In late nineteenth-century Japan, Tomo is sent to Tokyo by her husband to select a young woman to serve as his concubine. She obeys. Then she is asked to do it again. The Waiting Years follows one woman’s lifetime of quiet suffering under a system that demands her complicity in her own humiliation.

Why Read This

If Masks shows Enchi’s artistry at its most intricate, The Waiting Years shows her moral vision at its most direct. The novel won the Noma Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, when it was published in 1957, and it remains one of the most devastating portraits of marriage in Japanese fiction. Tomo is not passive out of weakness. She endures because the social order leaves her no other option, and Enchi makes the reader feel every year of that endurance.

What to Expect

A straightforward, chronological novel spanning several decades. The prose is clear and the story is easy to follow. The difficulty is entirely emotional. Enchi writes with a restrained fury that makes the quiet domestic scenes feel like slow-building indictments of an entire social system. The final pages are among the most powerful in all of postwar Japanese literature.