The Twilight Years


The Twilight Years, a 1972 novel by Sawako Ariyoshi, sold over a million copies in her home country and was praised by the Japan-studies community in foreign countries as a singular novel, "the closest representation of modern Japanese life" according to Donald Keene and a forthright, insightful work into the experience of modern Japanese women.
The work, which begins with the married protagonist's father-in-law seemingly doddering around in senility on a winter street underdressed, deals with the twin issues of Aging of Japan and role of women in Japan, who were/are de facto expected to be caretakers of elderly parents or grandparents in a household. Although the novel at times digresses into what may be characterized as a mere extended complaint about the subservient role women experience in Japan, the work was prescient in that it foreshadowed the current demographic crisis facing Japan, i.e. a population rapidly entering old age without sufficient young workers to take care of the problems of advanced senescence.
Even-paced and slowly charting the twists and turns of emotion as the family struggles with an old man who is barely continent, The Twilight Years remains an academically-respected work if unknown to the general population. Like much of Japanese literature, the emotion is understated and even, yet contains both a slice-of-life packaging and a broad overview of the problems/dilemmas facing modern life along with 'neat' coincidences of time/space. Lacking historical grandeur, the sweep of war, or tremendous social upheavel, the work is yet compact, moving and dedicated.