FLOATING CLOUDS by Fumiko Hayashi, translated by Lane Dunlop. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, 328 pp., $27.50 (cloth).

Toward the end of her life Fumiko Hayashi (1903-1951) said that she did not think her work would outlive her. Happily, she was quite wrong: She remains one of Japan's most read authors, it seems that her works will live as long as Japanese literature does, and here is a new and needed translation of what many think her finest work.

"Floating Clouds (Ukigumo)" (1951), Hayashi's last novel, is also her most venturesome in that she moves from the autobiographical fiction of her first work, "A Vagabond's Story (Horoki)" (1930), to a more structured account of her life and her times, keeping to what she knows best but locating it in a larger social context.

Yukiko returns to a defeated Japan. She had been in French Indo-China during the war itself and now comes back to a homeland completely changed. Her only hope is Tomioka, a man she loved, now repatriated like herself.

She looks at him and realizes that "he felt a deep self-distrust, a distrust . . . shared by everyone who had returned from the war efforts around the world. However, the country as a whole was so small and so densely populated that each person simply responded to the situation by holding himself apart in some way from all others. To pursue any wider truth, in this small, broken country, seemed impossible."

At the same time she knows that people feel that "out of this chaos, something good -- something they could rely on -- would come to them . . . a time of vicissitudes, with everything going around and around like a carousel, stimulated people."

The hoped-for good fortune does not come to Yukiko. Tomioka takes her with him when he finds a job on the island of Yakushima. They, who had met on the vast reaches of Japan's wartime empire, were now on the narrow edge of Japan's peacetime boundaries. Under the Allied Occupation this island was the end of Japan -- there was nothing further.

As she dies, Yukiko contrasts and remembers these two places and thinks of their associations, of the similarities and differences between then and now, bringing into focus the undergirding theme of love and death that so defines this work, and so delineates the destruction of the war.

In this world we can plainly see "the separate and isolated condition of human beings, who are like so many floating clouds . . . appearing, disappearing, then appearing again -- it did not matter when or where."

These are the final words of this novel, and though they describe the story, the atmosphere of the novel is not this elegiac. Rather, it is filled with observations often cynical, comments both objective and wry. The tone is that of a detached spectator who reports on what she sees and feels.

This is the strength of "Floating Clouds." It never pleads for emotion. Reading it, I thought of the celebrated film version by Mikio Naruse (1955), of the famous and heartbreaking scene where Tomioka puts lipstick and rouge on the dead Yukiko's face in an effort, infers the viewer, to make her appear better, to express his love, now that it is too late, etc.

In Hayashi's text this emotion is disposed of by the words "he took the lipstick and applied it to Yukiko's lips, but her lips were so dry that it was difficult." The power of the image is all Naruse's. This was what he was interested in.

Hayashi was interested in something else -- in creating a richly detailed panorama of the whole ruined postwar world; one in which, nonetheless, people are moving, living, hoping. Hers is not only a love story but also a social study showing why it is that people in love cannot stay that way.

In his very able translation, Lane Dunlop notes that he has made some abridgement. It was quite necessary. "Floating Clouds" was intended for serialized publication (November 1940 to August 1951) and is broken into 67 serial sections. In addition, there are story recapitulations and paddings of unnecessary plot detail.

There have been several English translations of this work, all of them inadequate and in any event unobtainable. One appeared in 1956 and another in 1957, both by non-native English speakers. One of these was cleaned up a bit and republished in 1965, but it is not until now that the English reader may confidently approach this novel.

Lane Dunlop has had long experience with Hayashi's work and style. He has translated "A Late Chrysanthemum," and "Borneo Diamond," and it is fitting that he give us this important novel in its first trustworthy and readable English edition.