Planetary Library: Modern Japanese Literature & Co.

Musings on Meiji, Taisho, and Showa (and sometimes Heisei) tidbits.

[planetarylib]

Laugh-out-loud moment with Edwin McClellan

I came across this statement by Edwin McClellan (translator of Soseki and generally crotchey man) in a review of Ivan Morris’s anthology of modern Japanese stories: 

“I have a few more minor objections to the selection. Mori Ogai, (certainly one of the great names, though possibly overrated) is represented by...” 

When I literally laugh out loud at the disses of 1950s elitist scholars... 

[planetarylib]

「しかし……しかし君、恋は罪悪ですよ。解(わか)っていますか」 But--but mind you, love is a sin. Do you know that?

From Kokoro by Soseki. Trans. Kondo Ineko. 

[planetarylib]

Heidegger's definition of phenomenology

“Thus ‘phenomenology’ means *Greek word*–-to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” Reading Heidegger is like reading the same page over and over again and not realizing that you’re actually reading different pages. Someone, please explain and get me out of this void of nothingness. From Being and Time.

[edenbaggins-deactivated20191011]

[planetarylib]

Fuck yeah, Takemiya Keiko.

The composition is perfect. The surrounding foliage, the bend of the wirst, the scarlet ribbon... Do we have our romantic Werther here? 

[universitybookstore]

猫と偉大な日本の作家。 (Great Japanese writers with cats.) Pictured here: Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, Haruki Murakami, and the cover of Natsume Sōseki‘s classic I Am a Cat.

[planetarylib]

Perfect.

[planetarylib]

Mishima Yukio

Once I am finished with my thesis, I’d like to indulge myself with Mishima Yukio. Read all his works. That towering corpus. Prolific. I imagine him writing into the night furiously; too much in his head to say, too slow of a hand to write. Everything stunningly beautiful, fine, shimmering, understated, piercing, cutting, icy, knowing, corporeal... 

If you haven’t read him before, I recommend beginning with Confessions of a Mask--his first novel, his autobiography-esque novel. As a bildungsroman, Confessions is exquisite. Imagine a young Mishima, princely, experiencing his first attractions. You can also look forward to the narrator’s first time masturbating--to an image of a martyred, bound saint...

Confessions of a Mask (1949) was translated in 1958 by Meredith Weatherby. 

[planetarylib]

My thoughts on Norwegian Wood in my life:

At 20 years old: Oh, my, God, this is the greatest novel. It touched my soul and I am changed forever.

At 24 years old: Huh, this book is longer than I remember it being. Why is Midoriko portrayed as such a nymphomaniac?

At 27 years old: I hate this book; It’s just a fantasy for men that uses women as a means to a goal. Real women aren’t divided into Naokos and Midorikos. Murakami is a complete egotistic misogynist.  

Okay, but I still have to be thankful to this novel because it turned out to be my “gateway drug” into other modern Japanese literature. So...

*Norwegian Wood was originally published in 1987; translated in English in 2000 by Jay Rubin*

[planetarylib]

Out (1997) by Kirino Natsuo is one of my favorites. The best thing about it--it is so very re-readable. Each time it’s still creepy, morbidly mesmerizing; and supremely feminist? Masako, the primary protagonist, is the baddest bitch of them all. But there are so many fascinating characters, not to mention the goody wife who murders her husband right at the beginning... 

Out was translated by Stephen Snyder in 2004.

[planetarylib]

“Debates on Kokoro” by Atsuko Sakaki

Full title: “Debates on Kokoro: A Cornerstone” From the monograph: Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction (1999)

I have read this chapter by Professor Atsuko Sakaki so many times, I feel as though I’ve nearly memorized it. If you are working on Kokoro (a not tiny fraction of Japanese literature academics), Sakaki’s chapter is a must. I guess it’s a little late to be promoting it, though. By now, 1999 is a wee bit old. There have been new developments in the debates (or, in Japanese, Kokoro ronsō) in the new century. 

But as usual, I was inspired this time around as well. This time, I looked at Sakaki’s chapter more structurally--how it is structured and by what methodologies--rather than the content itself. (What Komori Yoichi did!) The previous times I’d read this chapter, I was less in the know about literary theories (I’m still less in the know, but...). Now, I see that as Sakaki was drawing a timeline of Sōseki scholarship on Kokoro from the mid-1980s to 1999, she was also mapping the developments from structuralism to deconstructionism, along with new historicism, reader-response criticism, and author-centered approaches. It is so well done, it feels more like a story than a monograph chapter, that I hadn’t noticed before that the chapter is so precisely constructed. 

The chapter simultaneously gives me hope for my thesis and bums me out. While Sakaki had so much rich insight in a mere 15-year period, I’m........UGH. 

[planetarylib]

To Terra... by Takemiya Keiko

I just watched the film adaptation of To Terra... or Toward the Terra, depending on your source. I’ll call it Terra here. The original manga was created by Takemiya Keiko (all bow down!) from 1978 to 1980 in a shōnen (boys’) magazine. Since the film came out right away in 1980, I imagine that the manga was popular with its audience. From what I understand, Takemiya Keiko was the first woman to be published in that shōnen magazine. Fuck yeah. 

To begin with, I am a fan of Takemiya Keiko. Kaze to ki no uta (”Song--or poem, if you're snobby--of the Wind and Trees”). Discussion of that manga is for another day, but suffice it to say, it is a pathbreaking, controversial, epic, gorgeous shōnen-ai (boys’ love) manga set in a French boarding school in the nineteenth century.

Terra still has strong undertones of shōnen-ai tropes. The main characters are young, beautiful boys who form friendships with each other. Well, the manga does, I mean. The anime film trashes most of this, and it simply becomes a young adult science-fiction anime film. A true shame. Terra the manga is an example of genre-bending; a work that invites girl readers to participate. So that was disappointing. 

Takemiya Keiko is also known for her elaborate, sweeping illustration style. Terra is not nearly as ornate as Kaze to ki; Terra has more straight lines and edges, more of an art deco and sci-fi feel. But it’s still beautiful. This is also somewhat lost in the adaptation. I know this was 1980, but... Not that it’s terrible. There are some spectacular sci-fi landscapes that made me freak out, pause the video, and take screenshots. I think it’s the character drawings that disappoint me; they’re not really beautiful boys anymore but your run-of-the-mill shōnen characters. 

The film is difficult to follow. I am familiar with the manga so that helped me out a lot. But I wasn’t sure how to keep all the strands of the plot straight. 

The manga has been officially released in English by Vertical. 

[planetarylib]

Vita Sexualis by Mori Ōgai

Holiday. I am taking a break from Sōseki and decided to finally read Mori Ōgai’s Vita Sexualis (1909). It has been sitting on my shelf for months; a library copy, no less. And it’s very short, about 150 pages in English, so I don’t know why I didn’t get to it sooner.

I have been reading Sōseki for the last million years for my thesis–so it feels–but embarrassingly, I had never really read Mori Ōgai, a major contemporary of his. The only thing I have read is “Dancing Girl” (Maihime), his most famous short story, often assigned to college undergraduates. Vita Sexualis is the first…”novel” of Mori’s I’m reading.

But “novel” is really just a placeholder for whatever genre Vita Sexualis really is. Drawing on Heian-period zuihitsu–another difficult genre to explain; think miniature sketched essays–Vita Sexualis is a collection of sketches, most of which represent one year of the narrator’s sexual development. But in this case, it’s more like sexual non-development. We begin when the narrator is six years old; end when he is just 21 years old.

I must say, the narrative is fascinating. This is NOT your normal bildungsroman in which the protagonist discovers the joys and sorrow of sex. Our protagonist in Vita Sexualis is what we might retrospectively call asexual. According to him, he feels almost no sexual desire, even during his teenage years. The thought of sex often repels him; he judges his fellow schoolmates for indulging in their carnal desires.

Instead, the narrator dreams of romance–different from sexual desire. A pure romance that reflects the great Chinese literature of the past. Once, he happens to see a girl in front of a shop. He doesn’t know who she is, never meets her. But in his imagination, they are lovers (again, not in the sexual sense); this illusionary figure sustains him and pains him; he is lonely.

For me, the most revelatory aspect of the story was the completely natural place of homosexuality (again, anachronistic here; I’m sorry). I am not well-versed in Edo culture, but if I remember my professors’ lectures all right, male-male sexual relationships were an Edo practice that died out with the emergence of modernity and Western prudeness. At the narrator’s secondary school, the male population is divided roughly into two groups: the “mashers” and the “queers.” Basically, the straights and the gays. But the narrator rejects both these groups; somehow, he manages to make two friends who likewise do not seek sexual desire (or at least, less than the typical teenage boy). The trio form their own comradeship, bashing the vulgar exploits of the mashers and queers.

Let me say a cliche: this is a psychological novel. The narrator is actually a man in his 40s who appears in the beginning and end. In between, he is writing a memoir–the bulk of the story we read. In fact, he is essentially psychoanalyzing himself; trying without exception to write down the truth. He is open about his insecurities about his physical appearance. There are plenty of moments that discuss masturbation without explicitly mentioning the word. Oh yeah, I forgot to say that this was banned almost immediately in Japan. Obviously.

I want to read more Mori after this. What a refreshing, corporeal read after surviving the puritan, mental contortions of Sōseki. Perhaps we should all write our own autobiographical sexual development. Though I’m not sure I’m ready for that rabbit hole.

The translation was published in 1972 through Tuttle by Kazuji Ninomiya and Sanford Goldstein.