The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi
Published 1957 · 62,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is The Waiting Years to read?
The Waiting Years scores 65 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 54 out of 100
- Bester's translation carries Meiji household vocabulary, terms of rank and address, kimono and textile detail, and the bureaucratic titles of the new government.
- Sentence structure: 56 out of 100
- Formal, controlled sentences that mirror the household's decorum, with long descriptive passages and dialogue in which almost nothing is said directly.
- Abstraction: 58 out of 100
- Concrete domestic scenes carry a continuous analysis of what the Meiji family system does to the women inside it, delivered almost entirely by implication.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Meiji bureaucratic ranks, the legal position of concubines, marriage economics and forty years of family chronology are all conveyed without exposition.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- Tomo's interior life is systematically withheld — she is described from outside for most of the book — and her rage becomes visible only in the last pages, retroactively recolouring four decades.
- Symbolic density: 66 out of 100
- The title's slope, the accounts Tomo keeps, Suga's illness, and the final instruction about the body carry the argument the narration refuses to state.
- Ironic distance: 76 out of 100
- A wife shopping for her husband's mistress with his money and her own judgment, doing it well, is the novel's premise and its indictment. Enchi never editorialises and never needs to.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Tomo dies without ever having spoken; the husband's reaction to her last request closes the book on one small crack in a wall, with nothing repaired and no one freed.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Chronological across forty years in five parts, with shifting focus among the women of the household and long jumps between sections.
How The Waiting Years is regarded
The Waiting Years holds a literary regard score of 71 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.