Tetsuo Miura’s first novel translated into English has sold over a million copies in Japan since it was published in 1961 — despite telling the story of an aimless young man who forces himself on a woman he meets in a ryotei restaurant in Tokyo, only to subject her, after they marry, to a life of despair and poverty. Four of his five siblings have either committed suicide or disappeared, and he perpetually broods on what he calls “the deadly lure of my tainted blood,” all the while fruitlessly working away, day and night, on his own writing. Miura’s diaristic style forcefully conveys the bitter unraveling of his unnamed narrator’s mind — and makes, in its own way, for a best-seller kind of read.