The Waiting Years

Fumiko Enchi was the pen-name of Fumi Ueda, one of the most prominent Japanese women writers in the Showa period of Japan. Her first play,A Turbulent Night in Late Spring, performed at the Tsukiji Little Theatre, was a success and a short story published in 1952, Days of Hunger, was acclaimed by the critics and won the coveted Women Writers Prize.On the publication in 1957 of The Waiting Years – a novel she took eight years to write – she won Japan’s highest literary award, the Noma Prize. Enchi