Yasuoka Shotaro was born 30 May 1920 in Kochi City on the island of Shikoku. Family tradition held, however, that he had been born a month or so earlier, and although Kochi continues to be identified as his hometown, Yasuoka has never spent more than two consecutive months in that city in his life. As a result in later years he would claim, "I have no place I can unequivocally call my hometown.... I feel as though I have had to start life out burdened with the fate of a typographical error. It is almost as if my noncommittal nature and my habit of prevarication had their origins there." It is singularly appropriate that such a writer's life should begin void of a fixed home or birthdate. His personal experiences--and their re-creations in his literature--have returned time and again to questions of roots, of home and its meaning, and to...