What I’m Reading: past entries (2005)
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To see “What I’m Reading” entries from 2004, click here. To see those
from 2003, click here.
Posted on
12/30/05:
For many years, I've been hearing
about C.P. Snow's famous 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures,
and now in preparation for an article I'm writing I have finally read it.
It's a thoughtful plea for some sort of bridge of understanding between the
sciences and the humanities, which already half a century ago had lost any
common language for dialogue. Even more interesting, I thought, was the
geopolitical interpretation of world history that flashes through the
text: we in the West, Snow argues, had better get this right, because
those in the East already know the way.
I've also recently read Kyung Hyun Kim's The Remasculinization of Korean
Cinema, a simultaneously elegiac and
critical study of the New Korean Cinema, that burst of extraordinary filmmaking in the 1980s and 90s that inevitably gave way to the
blockbuster mentality of more recent films such as Shiri
and J.S.A: Joint Security Area. Kim uses a Lacanian
psychoanalytic model to read a wide range of Korean films in terms of the
shifting portrayals of masculinity they evidence: sadistic, masochistic,
scarred, etc. The book can be dense, but it provides a very useful
framework for understanding the work of the great Korean directors of recent
years, especially against the backdrop of the historical violence the Korean
peninsula has witnessed over the last half
century.
Finally, as bedtime reading with my youngest, I'm midway
through Liz Kessler's The Tail of Emily Windsnap. It's the story of a junior high school student who
discovers that she is part-mermaid. My nine-year-old swears it is the
best book ever written, but I'm withholding judgment for now.
Posted on
12/6/05:
One of my goals
for my current two-year stint in
I've also recently finished Kyoko Hirano's fine study of
early postwar Japanese cinema, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo:
Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation,
1945-1952. Japanese wartime censorship policies were of course
abolished with the onset of the Occupation--only to be replaced with a new
censorship regime, one that was often at loggerheads with itself.
It couldn't figure out which was more important: promoting
democracy or suppressing communism. Fascinating stuff.... I'm also
enjoying Susan L. Burns' very useful study, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern
Japan, which looks carefully at the "
Posted on
11/19/05:
I'm currently midway through
two volumes of fiction from the 1930s, each an instance of the explosion in
socially committed writing from that decade. The first is Faulkner's Light in August,
which I'd never read before. A bit more prolix than his other novels,
it's still a fascinating attempt to depict how individuals live out the ocean
currents of history and society. It's interesting, too, to see Faulkner
edge his way toward the explicitly political, no doubt in response to the work
of his contemporaries--John Dos Passos, John
Steinbeck, and others.
The second is a collection of Takeda Rintarô's
stories. Takeda was a peripheral
member of the Proletarian Literature movement, but was also shaped by the
modernist New Sensationist school,
as well as by the seventeenth-century stories of urban culture by Ihara Saikaku. "Bôryoku"
(Violence, 1929) is a fairly conventional Prol-Lit
narrative of the political awakening of a young writer, as he moves in stages
from vague dissatisfaction to anarchism to Marxism. "Hangyaku no Rotsu" (Rotsu the rebel [?], 1929) is similar, the story of a
worker-activist and his daughter; it sympathetically portrays the relations of
different generations of the Japanese Left--the vulgar Marxism of the 1910s,
the theory-driven Fukokmoto-ism of the 1920s.
"Nihon Sanmon opera" (Japan Threepenny Opera, 1932) is Takeda's masterpiece. The
title derives, of course, from Brecht, and the
impressionistic story surveys the inhabitants of a cheap boardinghouse in lowertown
I'm also midway through Hans Eisler and Theodor Adorno's 1947 Composing for the Films, as well as Torii Akio's fascinating study of medieval
Japanese literature, Shokuzai no sekai: Nô denshô bungaku
no seishin shi
(The world of atonement: an intellectual history of Noh and oral
literature).
Posted on
10/27/05:
I've been working hard lately to finish up
a long-in-the-works project on Kurosawa Akira, Hattori Ryōichi, and Kasagi Shizuko, which I plan as the first chapter for the
book I am writing on postwar popular music in
In a somewhat related vein, I was quite impressed with
Koichi Iwabuchi's Recentering Globalization: Popular
Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, a sophisticated
study of the ideological frameworks through which Japanese and other East
Asians perceive the increasing integration of popular culture distribution in
the region. I've also read Hiroshi Aoyagi's Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Peformance
and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan, an ethnographic
study of Japanese teen idol culture that I'm reviewing for an academic
journal.
And for sheer fun, I'm devouring Jim Thielman's Cool of the Evening, the story of the
1965 Minnesota Twins, a team full of remarkable characters that came within one
game of winning a world championship. It's helping me recover spiritually
from the Hanshin Tigers’ humiliating defeat in this year's Japan Series.
Posted on
10/11/05:
Two distantly
related novels. The first is William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. I'm
composing a short story just now in which his fiction plays a small part, and
it occurred to me that I should perhaps brush up on my Faulkner. After
all, the last time I read any of his work was as an undergrad, more than
twenty-five years ago. I'm quite enjoying this return visit to
The second is Ôe Kenzaburo's semi-autobiographical novel Natsukashii toshi e
no tegami (Letters to My
Sweet, Beloved Year; 1986). The book is massive—600 pages in my pocket
paperback edition. It creates an intricate exoskeleton that wraps around
all of Ôe's previous fiction,
transforming them into incidents from the life of the narrator (modelled, of course, after Ôe himself) and Brother Gii,
the autodidact lover of Dante who mentors the narrator from childhood on in a
rural mountain village. It was Faulkner's fiction, in part, that opened Ôe's eyes to the
importance of capturing in literature the spiritual life of a supposedly
backward region, such as the mountains of
Posted on
10/1/05:
Two very
different fictional accounts of colonial life. The first is Dumb Luck, the
wonderful 1936 satire by Vu Trong Phung.
It provides hilarious send-ups of social climbers and self-appointed elites in
colonial
The second, unexpectedly, is France Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden,
the current bedtime-story selection for my nine-year-old. It's another
children's classic I missed the first time around because of the unfortunate
accident of having been born a boy. What I find unexpected (here my chromsomatic deficiency stands exposed) is the strong
colonial subtext that runs throughout the book: the heroine was born and
raised a spoiled expat brat in
Posted on
9/20/05:
As part of a project
of looking at the postwar jazz singer Kasagi Shizuko,
I've been giving much thought lately to what it means to perform a piece of
music--especially a piece of music that was composed by somebody else (usually
Hattori Ryôichi, in Kasagi's
case). I've just finished reading Christopher Small's
now-classic study, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and
Listening. As the book's title already
suggests, Small is trying to rethink music as a verb rather than a noun, as
something that we all do. Music is a happening in which we
try to enact an ideal vision of our relations with others and with the world,
and everyone takes an active role in the event: composers, performers,
audience members, ushers and ticket-takers.
In a similar vein, I'm also now reading Songbook, a collection
of Nick
Hornby's writing on
popular music. Hornby makes no claim to be a
musicologist or even a musician, and yet he writes with such passion and wit
that his best essays are capable of cutting through the accumulated crap and
getting you to open your ears again.
Posted on
9/9/05:
My
random nibbling of recent British writing continues. I’m currently enjoying Peter
Robinson’s latest
book, Untitled Deeds, a collection of aphorisms and prose
poems. Some samples: “Yesterday my five-year-old daughter
told us about a dream in which she gave birth to her mother. But would that be less or more
significant if she’d simply invented it to entertain us?”;
and “Do unto yourself as you would do unto others.”
And
I recently finished Nick Hornby’s wonderful and entertaining novel, High Fidelity. There’s a
special pleasure in reading a pointed skewering of your own self: as even a brief glance through the
contents of this webpage will reveal, I bear more than a slight resemblance to
the list-making fanatics that populate Hornby’s
fictional world. This tale of the
loves and woes of the owner of a small record collectors’ shop, his fear of
commitment, his little vanities and obsessions, his attempts to explain to the
world who he is by changing the record on the
turntable: it all hits deliciously
close to home. Of course, I’m much
nicer, but still: I grow old, I
grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled….
Posted on
8/23/05:
I’ve
recently finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, as part of the continuing project to
catch up on authors that my graduate students plan to research. The novel, about an aging painter in
postwar
So why the mixed feelings? In part, as a specialist in modern
Japanese cultural history, I can’t help but bring up questions of historical
accuracy. The depiction of the
fanatical pro-war Matsuda struck me as a bit off, for example: he argues for the need to invade Asia in
order to save
On the other hand, Ishiguro does a lovely job of recreating a fictional
version of Japanese urban life, both prewar and postwar. The places he depicts are all, so far as
I can tell, products of his imagination, and yet they ring quite true. And I was especially fond of the novel’s
closing pages, in which the historical fiction begins to take on a broader
scope, and you realize that the book is in some ways an allegory about the
process of aging, how we all become increasingly weighted down by guilt and failure
as we grow older, and how we are all left in the end hoping only that things
will somehow work out better for the young.
Posted on 7/3/05:
Trying to catch up on some of the authors that my graduate
students are researching, I've been reading some terrific semi-recent fiction.
For starters, I finally got around to reading Kazuo Ishiguro's wonderful The Remains of the Day, which turns out to be even better than
the movie. Now I'm enjoying Karen Tei
Yamashita's satirical work of magic realism, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Yamashita weaves together
Next up, I plan to read a book I just bought here in
Tokyo, Nihon Sanmon
Opera (Japanese Threepenny Opera), a collection of 1920s and 30s short
fiction by the proletarian literature writer Takeda Rintarô.
Everytime I read about Takeda, I find him utterly
fascinating, and I've been meaning to read him for several years. And now
I have a copy of the book sitting on my desk....
Posted on
5/10/05:
When I first watched
Mada da yo, Kurosawa Akira's last film, I thought the hero, a
lovable writer surrounded by devoted young disciples, must be modeled after Natsume Sôseki—even though the
film's story extended into the postwar era, decades after the real Sôseki died. I subsequently learned that the movie
was based not on Sôseki, but rather on Uchida Hyakken (1889-1971), another writer--in fact, one of those
devoted young disciples who hung around Sôseki.
Lately, I've been reading his Hyakkien zuihitsu, a collection of his short sketches (zuihitsu)
first published in 1933. The pieces are all whimsical, and (like much of Soseki's writings) show a fine haikai
sensibility.
With my daughter, we've been reading Avi's charmingly silly The End of the Beginning, a tale of
the very modest adventures of a snail named
Posted on
4/12/05:
With the arrival of baseball
(and not a moment too soon, I might add), I have been sinking my teeth into Baseball Prospectus 2005, the annual publication that has emerged
in the last several years as the widely accepted successor to the great Bill
James Baseball Abstracts of the 1980s. As always, it's full of great
information and opinions, and sometimes quite funny (though the humor seems a
bit strained and predictable this time around--or maybe I've just read too many
of these things by now).
I am enjoying it thoroughly, of course, but also
finding myself troubled by a certain ideological bent to it--not that the
writers are consciously carrying any political banners here, but nonetheless
they employ basic frameworks that do carry an implicit worldview. This
can be seen at a number of levels, but perhaps is best summed up as
follows: the heroes here are not players, but rather general
managers. The fantasy that drives the book's passion is not the dream
that you might someday come to bat in the bottom of the ninth, Game 7 of the
World Series, but rather that someday you might sit in the executive suite and
control the destinies of your employees through your mastery of statistics and
management savvy. To put this in something like
Posted on 3/6/05:
As research for a paper I'm working on that deals with Kurosawa
Akira's use of music in his films, I'm reading Nishimura Yuichiro's
terrific study, Kurosawa: Oto to eizo (Kurosawa: Sound and Image) in the revised 1998 edition. As part of
the same project, I've also been reading through the new collection of Theodor Adorno's classic Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert. For
sheer fun, I've been reading Chumon no ooi ryoriten (The Restaurant with
Many Orders), the only short-story collection that Miyazawa Kenji published
in his lifetime (many of the stories in it are also available in English translation). And when I
feel like having my fun in English, I've been reading Ardashir
Vakir's 1998 novel, Beach Boy, which seems to have very little to do
with Brian Wilson or any of his brothers or cousins.
Posted on 2/3/05:
A mixed bag. I'm using my sabbatical to catch up on
some interesting books published recently in my field--for example, Andrew Barshay's The Social
Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions and Doug Slaymaker's The Body in
Postwar Japanese Fiction--and also to read some Japanese fiction
that has long been sitting on my bookshelf awaiting my attention, for example Shimazaki Toson's 1926 short
story "Shokudo" (The restaurant), the sad
tale of an elderly woman who realizes, one year after the horrific 1923 Tokyo
earthquake, that the old life of the city she loved so much is gone forever.
I'm also reading my first books of G.K. Chesterton mystery stories: The Incredulity of
Father Brown, first published in 1926. And for my daughter's bedtime
story, we've been working our way through Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Being father
to a daughter is a great experience for many reasons, one of which being that
you get to read all of the children's literature you skipped during your own
childhood because it was stigmatized as 'girl's books.'
Posted on 1/14/05:
In the past, I've read bits and pieces of Susan McClary's Feminine Endings:
Music, Gender and Sexuality, the groundbreaking study that
introduced feminist and cultural studies approaches into the discipline of
musicology. But now I'm actually reading it from cover to cover and finding
that more than a decade after its first publication, it remains an eye-opening
work, full of remarkable observations and great wit. She takes up both
classical and popular music and shows how ideologies of gender and sexuality
are embedded in the very structures of musical form. For fun, I'm also reading
Jane Smiley's 1981 novel, At Paradise Gate, which among
other things contains the best description I've ever read of the pleasures of a
long, hot bath. It's not quite as funny as Moo, her loving
parody of campus life, but still a finely constructed work of fiction
To see “What I’m Reading” entries from 2004, click here. To see those
from 2003, click here.
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