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Posted on 12/31/06:
Futabatei
Shimei is widely heralded as the father of the modern
Japanese novel. But after finishing
(or perhaps abandoning) his first major work, Ukigumo (Drifting Clouds, 1887-89), he
stayed away from fiction for several decades. He only resumed novel-writing a few
years before his death in 1909. Heibon (Medocrity, 1907) is one of those later works, and I’d
always wanted to read it. It’s a
fictionalized account of the author’s own life, focusing on a series of
episodes: his boyhood bond with his
grandmother and with a pet dog, his move to
Given
my own recent interest in music and national culture, the following passage
from chapter 53 caught my eye. It
describes the mental state of the protagonist, listening to Oito,
the boardinghouse maid he is about to seduce (or perhaps be seduced by), practice
her shamisen.
I don’t
know anything about folk ballads.
But even though I don’t understand them, I really like them. Whether it’s Shinnai
or Kiyomoto style, when I hear them sung skillfully, it’s
as if something resembling what you might call national spirit appears in the
lively [iki]
voice and delicate melody, touching on something that lurks deep in my soul; I
find myself remembering things and feeling vaguely nostalgic. It’s as if I am imbibing something
that has lived on in the Japanese people for two thousand years, not in the
indirect form of an intellectual concept, but as something that is carried
directly by the raw, physical human voice, something that remains formless as
it appeals directly to the human heart.
That which seemed clear becomes unclear, and as I pursue its deep
meaning, when I listen to Oito-san’s song, that’s how
I feel: as if the very essence [sui] of life, the lively [iki] savor were
carried on Oito-san’s voice, moving through my ear to
penetrate my heart, touching the marrow of my vitality, shaking my entire
existence. [My own very rough
translation]
It
seems a remarkably compact expression of the tangled webs of national identity,
sexual desire, and aesthetics—including foreshadowings
of Kuki Shûzô’s explorations of iki and sui a few
decades later.
The Kôdansha pocket edition that I am reading
is particularly useful, since it also includes Futabatei’s
influential early translations from Russian literatures, as well as his later
essays reflecting on his own role in creating the modern novel and its
characteristic writing style.
Posted on 12/18/06:
Every
few years, I get suckered into reading a book of “genre fiction” (science
fiction, spy and detective novels, fantasy, etc.) by a friend who swears that a
certain author is the real thing, a genius unrecognized only because of
snobbish prejudice against his or her particular type of writing. So, I go out and buy a copy of said
author’s work and read it – and find myself disappointed. The characters and characters are mechanically
predictable, while the writing stumbles along.
I’m
pleased, however, to have enjoyed some exceptions to this pattern as of
late. With my youngest, I’ve just
finished Ursula Le Guin’s The Earthsea Quartet as our
bedtime reading selection. The four
fantasy novels are marvelous, particularly the two that center on Tenar and her life story: these take up such difficult issues as
the cruelty of adults toward children, the meaning of death (and, for that
matter, of sex), and our blind duty to love one another—treating them with
sensitivity and wisdom. The
characters and stories continuously delight, and the writing sparkles with
style. We’re already moving forward
into the sequels.
I’m
now also halfway through my first Patricia Highsmith novel. I’ve been reading enthusiastic reviews
of Highsmith’s work for years, and I’ve always
enjoyed the Alfred Hitchcock film version of her thriller, Strangers on a Train. It turns out that The Talented Mr. Ripley is a
tidy little piece of fiction, dotted with enough literary allusions (in this
case, to Henry James) to keep this Ph.D. happy. I can hardly wait for the delicious
psychopath anti-hero to carry out his dastardly plans.
Posted on 12/7/06:
I
recently read Josephine Yun’s jrock, ink.: a concise
report on 40 of the biggest rock acts in Japan,
hoping to catch up on a generation of bands I know precious little about: the 1990s hard rock scene bands,
especially the visual-kei groups. I can’t tell my La’cryma
Christi from my L’Arc-en-Ciel or my Dir en grey. They all pretty much look and sound the
same to me – and yes I know the fault lies with me here. Yun devotes a
page of text to each band and tries hard to describe their various sounds: e.g., the brilliant green’s music has “a
touch of the Beach Boys and faint hints of the Goo Goo Dolls, it grooves securely, rumbly
rough but softened oft by the timbre of Tommy’s vocals,” whereas on Sex
Machineguns’ songs “Heavy guitars and speedy, fast-flying (sometimes majestic)
riffs abound, plowing, shredding, and storming with relentlessly staccato
drums.”
Unfortunately, after reading the book rather
carefully, I find they’re all still pretty much jumbled together in my
brain. I guess Elvis Costello was
right: this is a bit like dancing about architecture. And it doesn’t help that the volume uses
airbrushed paintings instead of photographs as illustrations, or that the
discography section at the back is woefully incomplete.
Posted on 11/19/06 (updated 12/2/06):
I’m
currently about two-thirds of the way through Hino
Keizô’s brilliant 1985 novel, Yume no shima (
On
an utterly different note, in preparation for an upcoming visit to Okinawa (my
first), I have been reading Okinawa: tôgô
to hangyaku (
Arakawa in turn cites Norma Field’s In the Realm of a Dying Emperor (which is
available in Japanese translation), and so I finally
took up that book, which I’d been meaning to read since it was first published
more than a decade ago. It seems to
me that Field proposes an excellent solution to a problem that faces all of us
who teach “Japan Studies” abroad:
which version of
I’ve also been re-reading Michael Molasky’s
fine study, The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory, which
is also just out in Japanese translation. Molasky’s book
includes a very useful analysis of Arakawa’s poetry – and, incidentally, it was
the topic of this month’s meeting of the WINC
(Workshop in Critical Theory) study group here in
Posted on 11/9/06:
On
the recommendation of a friend, I’ve just read J.M. Coetzee’s astonishing
novel, Disgrace (1999). It tells the tale of a middle-aged
college professor (ahem) who disgraces himself sexually, only to subsequently
get mashed up in the gearworks of History. The story works not only as an allegory
for postcolonial, postapartheid
As
part of my campaign to read more contemporary Japanese literature, I’ve also
decided to try to read the occasional manga as
well. Shissô nikki (Disappearance
diary, 2005), by Azuma Hideo, is an autobiographical account of the period in
the artist’s life when he dropped out of society and became homeless. It won the 2006
Tezuka Osamu Prize for manga, and
its aesthetic is clearly literary – specifically, it is a kind of I-Novel,
where the act of confession generates the powerful emotional charge that brings
the work to life. In an interview given
at the time of the prize, though, Azuma denies that the work should be read as
a confession (zange). He says he wrote the manga
specifically for his wife, saying in it what he could not say to her directly,
but that rather than unburdening himself from his sins, he wanted to tell her
about the interesting things that happened to him out on the streets.
Posted on 10/23/06
Two
volumes have been occupying most of my reading hours lately. While I have skimmed parts of it before,
this is the first time I’ve done a serious, cover-to-cover read through of Kamei
Hideo’s Shôsetsu ron: Shôsetsu shinzui
to kindai (On the
novel: The Essence of the Novel and modernity, 1999). Tsubouchi Shôyô’s mid-1880s writings on the theory of the novel have
long been celebrated as the beginning of modern Japanese literary criticism—but
also regarded as something of a quaint relic. According to conventional wisdom, Shôyô sort of had the right idea, but was too backward to
really grasp the notion of the modern novel that he was advocating. Kamei takes a jackhammer to this conventional
wisdom, persuasively showing how Tsubouchi brought
together the sophisticated theories of narrative and language that were created
in Japan before the opening to the West (by such figures as Takizawa Bakin, Ogyû Sorai,
and Motoori Norinaga) and
the current trends then in English-language rhetoric studies. It’s a remarkably detailed and
sophisticated analysis of Shôyô’s works that brings
out both their astonishing creativity and their ideological burden. As I read it, I had the distinct feeling
that the scales were falling from my eyes, as they say in
The
second volume continues my project of trying to brush up on Japanese fiction
written since the 1960s—that is, contemporary literature. I’ve previously read many short stories
by the great Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992), but
I’d always put off reading his acclaimed trilogy of novels set in the roji (the back alley
or ghetto), a literary topos that is often compared
to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county. Now I’ve jumped in, reading through Misaki (The Cape, 1976),
a collection of four mid-1970s novellas, including the title work that is also
the first part of the trilogy. It
is, not surprisingly, a powerful work, linking together violence, sexuality,
family politics, and (the unspoken issue, at least in this volume), prejudice
against the burakumin
community in
Posted on 9/29/06:
I’ve
wanted to read Michael Cunningham’s novel, The Hours, ever since I caught
the reviews when it was first published back in 1998. It’s a remarkable book, weaving together
three different, but interrelated, storylines: Virginia Woolf as she struggles to
compose Mrs. Dalloway in Richmond, England, in the 1920s; Laura Brown, a
depressed housewife and mother in early postwar Los Angeles who finds her only
spiritual sustenance in that Woolf novel; and “Clarissa Dalloway,” the nickname
for a book editor in contemporary New York City whose life mysteriously repeats
(with variation, of course) that of Woolf’s protagonist. It’s a loving tribute to Woolf, of
course, and it carries on her themes in brilliant fashion: the meaning of life, the meaning of
death, and the meaning of flowers bought in the morning for a party that
evening. A trick ending ties the
three storylines together in an all-too-tidy bow knot, but even that doesn’t
detract from the remarkable pleasures the book gives. I will have to track down more of
Cunningham’s fiction.
Posted on 9/18/06:
Yamaori Tetsuo’s Misora Hibari to Nihonjin (Misora Hibari and the Japanese,
1989) is, as the title suggests, a sort of Nihonjinron
(theories of Japaneseness) take on Misora Hibari, the great postwar enka singer. Yamaori is by training an anthropologist of Asian
religions, and as you’d expect, he looks to things like folk practices and
Buddhist ritual music for sources of Misora’s
attraction to Japanese fans. In
that sense, the book was pretty much as expected – and yet Yamaori
is also intelligent and honest enough to note where his argument falls
apart. He admits quite openly, for
example, that many of the musical qualities he wants to identify as being essentially
Japanese are actually widely shared across
Yamaori ends up
constructing a vast clash-of-the-civilizations sort of argument, whereby there
is one vast musical civilization that arises West of the Himalayas, and another
(the one that includes
Posted on 8\28\06:
I recently read through three related volumes. The first was Jay Rubin’s Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, an
unabashed celebration of the life and works of contemporary
That is one of the strengths of Matthew Strecher’s Dances With Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the
Fiction of Murakami Haruki.
A more scholarly
study, Strecher’s presents in detail the case that
has been made against Murakami in Japan – that he represents a consumerist
replacement of political struggle with therapeutics and resignation – and then
rebuts it persuasively, arguing that there is in fact a different kind of
political commitment that marks Murakami’s fiction. The book is intelligent, sophisticated,
and yet quite readable.
Finally, I worked my way through all 600 pages of
Murakami’s own Tôi taiko (Distant drum, 1993), a collection of travel writings
from the three-year stint he spent in southern
Posted on 7/18/06:
Tim O’Brien,
Going After Cacciato:
A Novel (1978)
I
arrived as a freshman at
I
don't know why it's taken me so long to get around to reading the book.
Probably some deep psychological block related to the stress of freshman
year. Or mortal laziness. At any
rate, the book is -- as everyone else said long ago -- a
terrific novel about
Next
I guess have to read July, July, O'Brien's most recent novel, based on the
notion of a
Posted on 7/16/06:
Murakami
Haruki, Kangarû hiyori (Kangaroo weather, 1986)
With a
student lately, I’ve been reading through this collection of short-short
stories that Murakami was commissioned to write for a Japanese magazine in the
early 1980s, before his breakthrough into mega-best-seller status. Some of the stories have a touch of
magic realism to them, as their twenty-something protagonists encounter
fantastically absurd situations (being hit up for charity donations by a sea
lion, or riding in a taxi driven by a vampire). Others present typical vignettes of
floating urban life during the 1980s:
the couple who visit the zoo to see a baby kangaroo in the title story,
a man who finds himself getting unbearably sleepy at
weddings, etc. A number of the
stories also provide playful post-modernist takes on the ambiguities of representation: can a sign really stand for
anything? And there is a Thurberesque war-of-the-sexes theme that weaves through
many of the pieces, as well. A good reading selection during the heavy, sweaty weather of July
in
Posted on 7/8/06:
Misora Hibari, Hibari jiden: watashi to kage (Hibari's
autobiography: me and my shadow, 1971)
The
autobiography of the most popular singer of postwar
Posted on 6/21/06:
Eric Cazdyn,
The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Duke University Press, 2002)
This is a fascinating study of how Japanese film over the
course of the last century can be re-thought in relation to the political and
economic crises of capitalism. Cazdyn
isn't so much interested in the contents of film stories as he is in the forms
through which those stories are told, and in the forms of sensibility that
films produce and reproduce in response to broad social transformations.
Covering a broad range of genres and styles, he focuses primarily on three
moments of historical crisis: the 1930s when
This is clearly one of the two or three best works we have in
English on Japanese cinema: it's intelligent, well researched and
often quite creative. Yet I often found myself mentally arguing back
against Cazdyn's interpretations and assumptions -- a
reaction that is another sign, no doubt, of the book's quality. At times,
it seemed to me, the arguments operate by way of rather simple homology between
the domains of economics and film, rather than exploring more thoroughly the
question of how culture and economy are mediated through one another -- the
approach the book takes in its strongest sections.
More fundamentally, though, I found myself disagreeing
with Cazdyn's reading of the current world historical
situation. He seems to think that the nation as a form is peripheral to
capitalism -- and hence reads the problem of contemporary globalization as
"the problem of a globalized system in which
nations are steadily losing their sovereignty" (p. 242), as transnational
corporations increasingly gain sway.
As I've argued
elsewhere in my own work, I just don't buy this view. It seems to me to
ignore the ambiguities of sovereignty that have always troubled the modern
nation state, that are in other words not anything new. Moreover, it
seems to misinterpret the fundamental importance of the nation-state form
to global capitalism. Nationalism is yet another face of
globalization: capital and nation require one another. Yes, things
are clearly changing in the world, but capitalism in the absence of the nation
is untenable: capitalism requires the nation-state to reproduce
itself, and vice versa.
That said, this is an
important and stimulating book. Now, if only someone would make it into a
good movie....
Posted on 6/11/06:
Ôe Kenzaburô’s 1989 novel Jinsei no Shinseki (available in
English translation as An Echo of Heaven) explores
characteristic territory: how we
use religion, literature, sex, and violence in our attempts to deal with
traumatic memories from the past.
As usual, our narrator is the novelist “K,” who lives with a handicapped
son named Hikaru and a no-nonsense wife, but here the
main character is their friend Marie, a vivacious, sexy woman (the narrator
repeatedly compares her to Betty Boop) who struggles
to find a meaningful way of life after suffering an unspeakable tragedy. The book’s intelligent and typically
complex in narrative form, but it also struck me as being less gripping than Ôe’s best work.
Posted on 6/7/06:
Juan Goytisolo is widely acclaimed as
Posted on 5/31/06:
Sawaragi Noi’s Nihon ·Gendai · Bijutsu (Japan/Contemporary/Art,
1998) attempts to theorize, rather than historicize, Japanese avant-garde art
movements of the past fifty years:
the
Posted on 5/24/06:
I’ve finished
reading Honda Yasuharu's "Sengo": Misora
Hibari to sono jidai (Postwar: Misora Hibari and her age), a thoughtful reconstruction of Japanese life in the
1940s and 50s as centered on the figure of the great enka
singer, Misora Hibari
(1937-1989). Of course, he gives us
Hibari’s
story: the early childhood success,
her unbreakable bond with her mother, the scandals that dogged her throughout
her career. But Honda is mainly interested in seeing Hibari
as a nodal point crisscrossed by the strands of countless ordinary lives, and
his real passion lies in retracing the personal histories of those (literally)
unsung figures: the school
principal who nearly flunked Hibari out of elementary
school, the man who took Hibari’s passport picture before her 1950 American
concert tour, the future hospital president who worked his way through medical
school as Hibari’s private tutor,
the local promoter who staged Hibari’s fabulously
successful 1956 concert tour in Okinawa, &c., &c. Through these ordinary-yet-extraordinary
lives, Honda maps out the energies and possibilities that characterized postwar
democracy in Japan—an era that he sees as having died out under the tidal wave
of material wealth that swept over in Japan from the 1960s on. Honda thinks that same tidal wave also drowned
out Hibari’s creative powers. But he treats her with great respect and
affection throughout.
Posted on 5/3/06:
I’m currently learning
a great deal from Robert Walser’s Running With The Devil:
Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. It’s a terrific piece of criticism that
works on many levels—to begin with, on the level of simply opening up my eyes
(ears, actually) to the intricacies of a genre of music that I have only rarely
listened to. It’s also helping me
to understand two problems I am wrestling with in my own book manuscript on
postwar Japanese music: the relationship
between classical and popular music, and the ways that gender gets played out through
music. The book is great fun to
read, on top of everything else.
I’m also enjoying Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which
I had never read before and which reminds a great deal of Natsume
Sôseki.
Then again, almost everything reminds me of Sôseki
these days—including Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which
is the latest bedtime reading selection for my nine-year-old.
Posted
on 4/18/06:
It's been a real
grab-bag as of late. I read Yoshimoto Takaaki's
"Hankaku" iron (An objection to the
anti-nuke movement, 1982), a typical example of Yoshimoto's iconoclastic stance. Here he goes after the anti-nuclear
movement of the early Reagan years for its failure to put the Solidarity
movement in
Posted
on 3/31/06:
On my desk right now
are two book manuscripts I'm supposed to referee for academic presses, plus two
doctoral dissertations awaiting my approval. Yikes! I've also been
reading the first volume of the latest in the Iwanami publishing house's
distinguished line of "Kôza" (lecture) multi-volume
sets. The series title is Iwanami Kôza: Ajia Taiheiyô Sensô (Asia Pacific War),
and the first volume is called Naze ima Ajia Taiheiyô Sensô (Why the
Asia Pacific War Now?). The series represents, I think, the most
comprehensive response made yet by Japanese scholars to the rise of
neo-nationalist, revisionist pseudo-history here over the last decade.
The editors reject earlier names used for the war (e.g., the
Pacific War, the Fifteen Years War) because they want to expand both the
spatial and temporal dimensions of their object of study. They want to
include (temporally) the build up of Japanese empire even before 1931, as well
as the post-1945 legacy of the war, including the various historical debates
over the war's meaning, and (spatially) the empire, occupied territories, and
the homefront. There is some unevenness in
quality among the essays, of course, but most are quite good--for example, a
terrific piece by Sugihara Tôru that connects the 1980s
anti-fingerprinting campaign by foreign residents in Japan with the history of
the fingerprinting system set up in wartime Manchukuo (the puppet regime
established by imperial Japan in Manchuria) to control dissent. It isn't
just the mindset and techniques that were carried over from
I'm also reading Satô
Yûko's
Sôseki no seorii: Bungakuron kaidoku (Soseki's Theory: An Explication of Bungakuron), which methodically works through Natsume Sôseki's 1907 Bungakuron
(Theory of literature), unpacking the theoretical position developed in
each of the work's five books. It's a useful guide to getting a
handle on a very challenging text.
Posted
on 3/11/06:
There was a cartoon by Roz Chast in a recent New Yorker (March 6, 2006)
titled "Falling Off the Math Cliff." I
took that sad plunge my senior year in high school, when I walked over the edge
of calculus. I've always regretted it--I really enjoyed math class before
that. I remember, for example, staying awake all night once in tenth
grade in feverish excitement: I was convinced I had disproved the
Pythagorean Theorem (it took my teacher about twenty seconds the next morning
to spot my error). I've always harbored the fantasy that someday I will
go back and pick up the trail where I lost it.
Why? Because numbers are interesting.
Earlier this year, I came across the magazine-format Sporting News Baseball
2006 at a bookstore here in
For a piece I'm writing, I've also been rereading Karatani Kôjin's
Architecture as Metaphor:
Language, Number, Money (1995),
an exhilirating critique of architecture, economics,
linguistics, and mathematics. As Joseph Murphy points out in The Metaphorical Circuit, Karatani is one of the few literary critics who can
really do the math, and he sure seems to be having fun with it in this
book. I'm green with envy.
Posted
on 2/26/06:
I'm midway through
the task of translating Natsume Sôseki's wonderful 1907
lecture, Bungei no tetsugakuteki kiso (The
philosophical foundations of the literary arts). There's already an English translation in print, but to
be honest, it's not particularly reliable or readable. As I work on this,
as well as on my own book about discourses of property ownership in Sôseki,
I've also started reading Angela Yiu's Chaos and Order in the Works of
Natsume Sôseki. I remain surprised at how little
criticism is available in English on Sôseki--one of the most
important writers of the twentieth century, Japanese or otherwise.
For fun, I'm reading the novel Time Lapse by Alvin
Greenberg, who used to be one of my creative writing teachers back at Macalester College.
It's the story of an English professor who is also a professional hitman: we faculty members have a right to dream,
don't we? As with all of Greenberg's writings, the book is playful,
intelligent, and reflective. Here, as the title hints, we encounter an
extended meditation on the nature of time. Finally, before bedtime with
my nine-year-old, I'm reading Emily and the Monster from the Deep by Liz
Kessler, the sequel to her The Tail of Emily Windsnap, which
you may recall has been acclaimed the "best book ever written" by a
certain member of my family. The sequel is only available in the British
edition, meaning that "Mom" has become "Mum" and that the
mermaid Emily now eats "crisps" at snacktime.
It's a challenge to perform the roles of all the various mermaids with English
accents.
Posted
on 1/24/06:
While back in the States over
Christmas, I had every intention of seeing the new Ang
Lee film, Brokeback Mountain, which is
based on an E. Annie Proulx short story that I admire
very much. That never came to pass, however, and now as penance I'm
reading her third novel, Accordion Crimes, which
traces through a violent century of American history as seen from the
perspective of a small green accordion. As usual with her writing, sparks
fly from the pages....
For the moment, I've paused in my campaign to read more
contemporary Japanese fiction in order to try to catch up on a few works that
my graduate students plan to take up in their dissertations. I am
presently midway through Mushanokoji Saneatsu's debut novella, Omedetaki hito (The
optimist, 1911), as well as
In the seminar I'm currently teaching on
postwar Japanese popular culture at ICU here in Tokyo, we've been reading bits
and pieces of many recent scholarly works, including John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in
the Wake of World War II, Yoshikuni Igarashi's Bodies of Memory: Narratives
of War in Postwar Japanes Culture 1945-1970,
Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's Kurosawa: Film Studies and
Japanese Cinema, and Michael Molasky's
The American Occupation of Japan
and Okinawa: Literature and Memory.
To see
“What I’m Reading” entries from 2005, click here. For those from 2004, click here. To see those from 2003, click here.
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