Panic / The Runaway : (UNESCO Collection of representative works : Japanese series)

1st Edition, 8vo wine cloth bds hardcover in dust jacket with light wear. VG/vgdj: xi+122pp; Translated from the Japanese by Charles Dunn. FROM THE PUBLISHER: two best-selling stories by Takeshi Kaiko, a popular contemporary Japanese writer deal with a theme often found in Kaiko's work: the plight of the individual struggling against the overwhelming pressures of the system. Panic, written in 1957, relates the story of Shunsuke, a hardworking young bureaucrat, as he tries to steer his own course through a corrupt world of officialdom. An employee of the forestry department of a local government, Shunsuke predicts a plague of rats and submits a detailed report outlining countermeasures against the pending disaster. First the report is snubbed; then, when the plague becomes reality and the town begins to panic, Shunsuke's superiors react in stereotypically bungling bureaucratic fashion. The Runaway, published 1959 two years after Panic, is set in Ch'in/Qin China in the third century B.C., a brief peaceful period following unification of the country under the first emperor Qinshi Huangdi. The narrator, a Chinese peasant, is abruptly wrenched from his quiet life, one of hundreds of thousands of men conscripted into a ruthless corvee system to build the Great Wall in an effort to keep out the barbaric Central Asian Hsiung-nu/Xiongnu from the newly established empire. The historic events of the time are visible only in dim outline, as they affect the life of the narrator.