ABSTRACT
Female readers are often frustrated by women writers who limit themselves to delineating the pain and suffering of woman as married, widowed, kept, or single when they have all the options available, including portraying the relationship of man and woman in its wholeness, a relationship in which love and work conflict. The plot and the portrayal of the heroine of A Journey Through the Mist shows distinct similarities to those of the classic Bildungsroman genre. A crude picture of the genre shows an especially rugged or especially sensitive young man, at leisure to mull over some life choices, so much connected to people or the landscape as encountering or passing through them as “options” or “experiences” en route to a better place. Mobility and individualism, which are pointed out by Susan Fraiman as the two key concepts in the quest/adventure plot of the Bildungsroman, play important roles in Yurie’s growing-up tale.
