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To see “What I’m Reading” entries
from 2005, click here. To see those from
2003, click here.
Posted on
12/29/04:
Over Christmas
break, I read Toni Morrison's remarkable 1973 novel, Sula. It's an astonishing piece of work,
one that belongs up there in the pantheon right next to Beloved. The book traces the story of a
small African-American community, the Bottom (located, of course, on a
hilltop), from the early 1920s through the mid-1960s, and it is quite simply
full of magic. Symbols echo from the landscape through the characters and
their obsessions, building up an almost mystical weaving linking people and
place. Morrison demonstrates a mastery of poetic and vernacular languages
that is currently a great source of envy for me. In a very different
vein, I've also started reading Boku no ongaku jinsei (My Life in Music), the 1982 autobiography of Hattori
Ryôichi, Japan's great jazz composer and arranger (He wrote, among thousands of
other songs, "Tokyo Boogie Woogie"). It's great to get an
insider's view of the vibrant jazz scene in 1920s and 1930s Osaka and Tokyo,
and I look forward to reading the chapters about the postwar jazz scene.
Posted on
12/13/04:
With my graduate
students this past quarter, we read Tomiko Yoda's terrific new study, Gender and National Literature:
Heian Texts in the Constructions of Japanese Modernity (2004, Duke University Press). Since the late 1700s,
scholars and critics in Japan have frequently claimed a feminine essence for
Japanese culture, most often citing Heian period (794-1192, or thereabouts)
works by women writers such as Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji or Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book. This strong tradition of writing
by women is one of the things that distinguishes classical Japanese literature,
but as Yoda demonstrates in her book, gender means remarkably different things
in different historical periods. She traces through the ways various
generations of scholars--from the Nativists (kokugakusha) of the late
1700s through the founders of National Literature Studies (kokubungaku)
in the early 1900s through the structuralists and narratologists of the 1970s
and 80s--have used the supposed femininity of Japanese classical literature to
construct ideologies needed in the present. She also provides close
readings of several Heian texts to show how they resist such readings--and also
provide possible solutions for intractable problems faced by contemporary
feminism. It's a fascinating book, one that joins a number of recent very
innovative studies in English of classical Japanese literature. It almost
makes a modern literature specialist like myself want to change
fields....
Posted on
11/13/04:
I've been reading
a collection of (longish) short stories by the great postwar writer, Takeda Taijun (1912-1976). One of my grad
students will be writing on him, so I thought I'd better reacquaint myself with
his work. Takeda was born the son of a Buddhist priest (a fact reflected
in the story "Igyô no mono" (The Misshapen Ones, 1950), and became a
devotee of Chinese literature at college in the 1930s. Things became
complicated for him when he was shipped off to China as a soldier in the early
1940s, and he spent much of his postwar career working through the question of
responsibility for wartime guilt. The story "Runintô nite" [On
the penal island] tells of juvenile offender made good who after the war
returns to the island to which he was reprimanded as a youth and takes revenge
on the local bully who brutalized and left him for dead back during the
war. It interweaves personal reminiscences with politics, both the
wartime suppression of political dissent and the postwar tensions between urban
reformers and rural recalcitrance. The most famous work here, "Hikarigoke" (Luminous Moss, 1954), which is
available in English translation, is written in the form of a playscript.
It records the trial of a captain who is accused of cannibalism during the
war. The captain's self-defense raises all the complexity of the issue of
war responsibility: how can anyone who was not there at that moment
possibly act as judge?
Posted on
10/23/04:
Stefan Tanaka's
new book, New Times in Modern Japan, which provides a critical accounting for
the way time was transformed in Meiji Japan--both the introduction of a new
sense of linear, progressive time (symbolized by the Gregorian calendar,
adopted by the new government in 1872) and the way that the new discipline of
history reconstructed the past to serve the interests of modernity. I
dealt with some of these issues in my own book, The Dawn That Never Comes, but Tanaka provides a much more detailed
and coherent mapping of the problem than I could. The book is a worthy
successor to his now-classic study, ">Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History">.
Posted on
9/11/04:
Arthur
Phillips' fine
debut novel, Prague, about a group of young Americans on the
make in Budapest (but they wish they were in Prague, where all the really cool
people go) in the free-for-all days right after the fall of the Iron
Curtain. Fine writing, wry humor, and a sense of history--not so much of
European history, but rather of the American-in-Europe genre of American
literary history--think Mark Twain, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James
Baldwin, &c. Quite enjoyable.
Posted on 8/1/05:
Murakami Ryu's
great coming-of-age novel, 69 (sixty nine), first published in Japanese
in 1987. I'm not always a great fan of the author, but this is terrific,
a breezy and funny story about being a teenager in provincial Sasebo (also home
to a major U.S. military base) in 1969, trying desperately to catch up with all
the changes that seem to be taking place in the world (protests against the
Vietnam War, flower power and hippies, acid rock, experimental film, etc.), but
trying even more just to impress the local girls. I saw the new film version
while in Tokyo last month and it led me back to the original novel. To
order 69 (sixty nine) in Ralph McCarthy's English translation
from www.amazon.com, click here. To order
it in the original Japanese from www.amazon.co.jp, click here.
Posted on 7/4/05:
Timon Screech's
very readable study, The Lens Within the Heart: The
Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan. Screech looks at how modern
European visuality, in which seeing was believing and in which precision meant
power, gradually diffused throughout late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth
century Japanese popular culture.. He sometimes paints with too broad a
brush, and one sometimes wants him to drive a point home more firmly, but those
are minor quibbles. And would that all scholars had Screech's flair for
prose!
Posted on
6/14/04:
I've been reading
Bill Holm's new poetry collection, Playing the Black Piano, one of Minnesota's finest contemporary poets. It's
alternately angry, sad, exuberant and joyful. His usual themes are all
present: passion for music, contrasts between life in Iceland and America
in this age of Fox News, etc. It closes with a terrific sequence of
elegies mourning the death of a friend from AIDS.
Posted on 5/29/04:
I had a student write
a paper on Enchi Fumiko's Onnazaka (The Waiting Years, 1949-57), which I
hadn't read in many years, so I've been working my way through it again.
It's a terrific portrait of the rage and ferocity of women squirming under the
constraints of the family system of late nineteenth century Japan. As
always, Enchi brings into play her extraordinary knowledge of classical
Japanese literature and culture as sources of ghosts that haunt her modern
characters. I've also been working my way through Yumiko Iida's useful
volume, Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics,
a survey of twentieth-century Japanese intellectual history. Iida argues
that a Romantic aesthetic, itself a product of modernity, has characterized
Japanese attempts to construct a counterdiscourse to modernity and its social
and cultural dislocations--whether in the 1930s, the 1960s, or the 1990s.
The book contains all sorts of useful summaries of the positions of various
thinkers and schools, as well as compact summaries of their historical
contexts.
Posted on 5/8/04:
I'm supposed to
participate in a roundtable discussion at "Constructed Places/Contested Spaces: Critical Geographies
in Korea," a
conference on social constructions of space in Korea to be held next week here
at UCLA. This is a very exciting project to be a part of--except for one
thing: I know very (very!) little about social constructions of space, in
Korea or elsewhere. So I've been working my way through Henri Lefebvre's
classic study, The Production of Space. I'm hoping it will help me get
through the conference without making too much of a fool of myself, and that it
will also help me in a project I am pursuing on reactions within modern
Japanese literature to the 1910-1918 Land Cadastral Survey undertaken in
colonial Korea. Along those lines, I've also been reading two works set
in colonial Korea by the Japanese proletarian literature novelist, Yuasa
Katsuei: Kannani (1934) and Honoo no kiroku (Record of
Flames, 1935), both very powerful works that indict Japanese imperialism,
sexism, and economic exploitation.
Posted on 4/24/04:
In graduate seminar this past week, we read Mori Ôgai's 1909 short story, "Hannichi" (A half day) and Yosano Akiko's essay "Ubuya monogatari" (Tales of the birthing room) from the same year. The latter is really quite impressive. Akiko nails so many points with a sort of take-no-prisoners mode of efficiency.. She declares, among other things, that gender is largely a matter of performance, that most female writers (including Higuchi Ichiyô, her near contemporary) don't write of true female experiences but rather produce the version of femininity that male readers desire, and--directly countering the ideologies of the Japanese state and of modern Japanese patriarchy--she insists that children belong to their mother rather than to their father, because the experience of childbirth institutes a bond that no male can ever understand. It's just a bravado performance--written from the birthing room, where Akiko had just delivered her third son and where the attending doctor had forbidden her to read or write. The Ôgai story, on the other hand, is quite odd: an autobiographical fiction about a respected scholar who is flabbergasted to find himself married to one of those "New Women" that everyone was talking about around 1910.
Posted on 4/11/04:
In graduate
seminar this coming week, we'll be discussing Ayako Kano's terrific book, Acting
Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism, a
study of the complicated reformulation of gender roles that accompanied the
rise of modern theater in Japan. I've also started in on reading the two
novellas that were recently awarded the Akutagawa Prize in Japan:
Kanehara Hitomi's "Hebi ni piasu" (Pierced snake) and Wataya Risa's
"Keritai senaka" (The back I'd like to kick). The writers are
both highly photogenic college-age women, a fact that has generated a great
deal of media attention in Japan. And it's that time of year again:
I spend far too much time these days pouring over the pages of Baseball
Prospectus 2004 with its reviews of every major league team and
player.
Posted on 3/24/04:
A mixed bag
lately. I'm nearly done reading Inger Sigrun Brody and Sammy I. Tsunematsu's
Rediscovering Natsume Soseki, which includes an English translation of
Soseki's Mankan tokorodokoro, the travelogue he wrote following his
journey to Manchuria and Korea in 1909. And I've started in on re-reading
Soseki's Michikusa (Grass by the wayside, 1915), which I'll be using in
graduate seminar shortly. I have also been reading Edwin Gragert's Land
Ownership Under Colonial Rule: Korea's Japanese Experience, 1900-1935,
which offers a revisionist version of the impact of the 1910-1918 Land Cadastral
Survey in colonial Korea. Korean historians have typically portrayed it
as a cause of massive disruption in the colonial countryside, one that resulted
furthermore in a Japanese land grab, but Gragert argues that it represented
more a continuation of earlier Korean policies, and that the real disruption in
the countryside didn't come until later decades, with the onset of the Great
Depression.
Posted on 2/28/04:
In my graduate
seminar on discourses of the family in Meiji literature, last week we read
Tokutomi Roka's Hototogisu (The Cuckoo; also known as Nami-ko, 1900) and
this week we read Hirotsu Ryuro's Zangiku (Late chrysanthemum,
1889): two great melodramatic stories of tuberculosis. I've also
been working my way through Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's Kurosawa: Film
Studies and Japanese Cinema, a book that is packed with interesting
insights. It's especially strong in it's critiques of existing studies of
Japanese film, though at times one wishes he would historicize in more
specificity the work of the critics he takes up--certainly, for example, Donald
Richie has written the politics out of Kurosawa's films in a very troubling
way, but we also need to raise the question of why Richie took up that stance
when he wrote his Kurosawa book, back in the 1960s. What aesthetic,
political, and cultural contradictions was he addressing indirectly via
Kurosawa? Yoshimoto's own readings of Kurosawa's films are often
quite lucid and helpful--it's great to have a book on Kurosawa of this quality.
Posted on 2/14/04:
With my graduate
students this past week, we read short stories by Shimizu Shikin, the great
(and largely forgotten) woman writer of 1890s' Japan. I've also been
reading Michael Molasky's terrific book, The American Occupation of Japan
and Okinawa: Literature and Memory, which is particularly strong in
bringing out the contradictions and ambiguities of postwar literature in both
Japan and Okinawa. Finally, I am engrossed in a remarkable new book on
the Kinks by the indefatigable Doug Hinman: The Kinks: All
Dad and All of the Night, basically a day-by-day listing of the activities
of the band from 1961-1996: you get concert dates (sometimes even set
lists), recording dates, radio and television appearances, etc.
Astonishing!
Posted on 1/24/04:
With my graduate
students this past week, I read Tsubouchi Shoyo's great 1889 novella,
"Saikun" (The wife). I really love this story, the tragic tale
of an orphaned 14-year-old maid servant and the unhappy housewife that
befriends her. The housewife ends up divorced, the maid servant ends up
throwing herself down a well--very sad, indeed. Next week, we'll be
reading one of the stories inspired, in part, by "Saikun":
Higuchi Ichiyo's 1895 masterpiece, "Jusan'ya" (The thirteenth
night). Plus, we'll start reading Rebecca Copeland's very useful study, Lost
Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan.
Posted on 1/3/04:
Michael
Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient, which in fact I'm having a hard
time getting into. I haven't seen the film yet. I've also just
started reading Tayama Katai's 1909 novel, Inaka kyoshi (The country
schoolteacher), which I've wanted to look at for years--it's another Meiji
period work that deals with tuberculosis, a topic I was doing research on a few
years back. With Sonia, I've been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's The
Long Winter, the seventh or eighth book in the "Little House"
series -- a chapter each night at bedtime. One of the bonuses of being a
parent is that you get to read all the children's books that you missed out on the
first time around -- including, for me, the "Little House"
series.
To see “What I’m Reading” entries
from 2005, click here. To see those from
2003, click here.