The Mud of a Century
Yūka Ishii’s debut novel The Mud of a Century was a major literary success in Japan where it won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.
Several days after a once-in-a-century flood moves through the Indian city of Chennai, choking the Adyar River with the titular mud, a Japanese woman contracted to an IT company as a language instructor finds herself caught up in a deluge of flashbacks and memories, reflecting on unspoken words and unlived lives and contemplating the muddy chaos of her own karma.
Told in a magic realist stream-of-consciousness style evocative of the subtle, wry sense of humour found in the traditional Japanese narrative art of rakugo, The Mud of a Century explores the interrelated bonds between self and other, Japan and India, past and present, fact and fantasy, and material and spirit.
Yūka Ishii was born in Hirakata in the prefecture of Osaka in Japan and graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo. Ishii worked in a variety of jobs — pastry chef, department store salesperson and snack hostess — while writing stories.
In 2014 Ishii moved to Chennai, India, where her husband worked as a Sanskrit language researcher, and started working as a Japanese language teacher. She made her literary debut at age 54 with her novel Hyakunen doro (The Mud of a Century), based on her experiences in Chennai during the 2015 South Indian floods. The book won the 49th Shincho Prize for New Writers and the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.
