The late Fumiko Enchi was, besides being a well-known novelist, a major scholar of Japanese literature. Like her father, Kazutoshi Ueda, she was a classicist. Her 1972-3 translation of "The Tale of Genji" into modern Japanese is popular, and her glossings of other classics are widely read.
The 1965 "Namamiko Monogatari" won Enchi several major local prizes and remains the best-known of her reinterpretations of classical texts. It is this work, ably translated by Roger Thomas, that is now given us by the always active and discerning University of Hawai'i Press.
The English title "A Tale of False Fortunes" is consonant with "A Tale of Flowering Fortunes," the title William and Helen Craig McCullough gave their translation of the "Eiga Monogatari." It was was purposely chosen to echo the earlier work because the "Namamiko Monogatari" is a reinterpretation of the "Eiga Monogatari" itself.