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Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden is one of the monuments of Japanese literature. This multigenerational samurai saga was one of the most popular and influential books of the nineteenth century and has been adapted many times into film, television, fiction, and comics. An Ill-Considered Jest, the first part of Hakkenden, tells the story of the Satomi clan patriarch Yoshizane and his daughter Princess Fuse. An ill-advised comment forces Yoshizane to betroth his daughter to the family dog, creating a supernatural union that ultimately produces the Eight Dog Warriors. Princess Fuse's heroic and tragic sacrifice, and her strength, intelligence, and self-determination throughout, render her an immortal character within Japanese fiction. Eight Dogs is the culmination of centuries of premodern Japanese tale-telling, combining aspects of historical romance, fantasy, Tokugawa-era popular fiction, and Chinese vernacular stories. Glynne Walley's lively translation conveys the witty and colorful prose of the original, producing a faithful and entertaining edition of this important literary classic.
Good Dogs explores the intersection of didacticism, Chinese vernacular scholarship, social criticism, and commercial storytelling in late Tokugawa Japan through an examination of a masterpiece of 19th century popular fiction: the novel Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi of Southern Kazusa; for short, Hakkenden), serialized from 1814 to 1842 by Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848). The author argues that in Bakin's hands, popular fiction functioned to mobilize and hybridize high culture and low, official and heterodox ideologies, and the demands of both the moralist and the marketplace. Good Dogs begin with detailed examinations of Hakkenden as, in turn, a work of gesaku (popular fiction); an adaptation and critique of the Chinese vernacular novel Shuihu zhuan (J. Suikoden, The Water Margin); and an exercise in kanzen chōaku, "encouraging virtue and chastising vice." Then it explores how the novel's blend of didacticism and playfulness destabilizes the putatively moral categories of gender, species, and social class, while foregrounding an image of moral agency that prefigures modern individualism. Good Dogs combines close readings of Hakkenden with a consideration of the novel's place in 19th-century Japan (including its Meiji reception), as well as its place in East Asian vernacular fiction.
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki is one of the most eminent Japanese writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his investigations of family dynamics, eroticism, and cultural identity. Most acclaimed for his postwar novels such as The Makioka Sisters and The Key, Tanizaki made his literary debut in 1910. This book presents three powerful stories of family life from the first decade of Tanizaki’s career that foreshadow the themes the great writer would go on to explore. “Longing” recounts the fantastic journey of a precocious young boy through an eerie nighttime landscape. Replete with striking natural images and uncanny human encounters, it ends with a striking revelation. “Sorrows of a Heretic” follows a university student and aspiring novelist who lives in degrading poverty in a Tokyo tenement. Ambitious and tormented, the young man rebels against his family against a backdrop of sickness and death. “The Story of an Unhappy Mother” describes a vivacious but self-centered woman’s drastic transformation after a freak accident involving her son and daughter-in-law. Written in different genres, the three stories are united by a focus on mothers and sons and a concern for Japan’s traditional culture in the face of Westernization. The longtime Tanizaki translators Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy masterfully bring these important works to an Anglophone audience.
Yi Kwang-su (1892-1950) was one of the pioneers of modern Korean literature. When the serialization of Mujông (The Heartless) began in 1917, it was an immediate sensation, and it occupies a prominent place in the Korean literary canon. The Heartless is the story of a love triangle among three youths during the Japanese occupation. Yi Hyông-sik is a young man in his mid-twenties who is teaching English at a middle school in Seoul. Brilliant but also shy and indecisive, he is torn between two women. Kim Sôn-hyông is from a wealthy Christian family; she has just graduated from a modern, Western-style school and is planning on continuing her studies in the United States. Pak Yông-ch'ae is a musically gifted young woman who was raised in a traditional Confucian manner; due to family misfortune, she has become a kisaeng but remains devoted to Hyông-sik whom she knew as a child. The Heartless goes beyond the level of romantic melodrama and uses these characters to depict Korea's struggles with modern culture and national identity.A long critical introduction discusses Yi Kwang-su's life and work from his birth in 1892 to the publication of his first novel The Heartless in 1917. It contains in-depth analyses of the novel, Yi Kwang-su's literary theory, and early short stories.
The novel in Europe in the early twentieth century took a decidedly inward turn, and Choucas (1927) is an intriguing example of the modernist psychological tradition. Its author, Zofia Nalkowska (1884–1954), was a celebrated Polish novelist and playwright. She rose to prominence in interwar Poland and was one of a group of early feminist writers that included Pola Gojawiczynska, Maria Dabrowska, and Maria Kuncewiczowa. Choucas is set in the Swiss Alps in the mid-1920s in a sanatoria village near Lake Geneva. The book has an international focus, and the narrator, a polish woman, profiles a motley collection of visitors to the village and patients at the sanatorium and their interactions with each other. Among these she encounters Armenian survivors of the 1915–16 genocide who were given refuge in Switzerland. The characters are all from different countries and each represents a distinct political or religious point of view. The title is derived from the French word for a species of bird native to this region of Switzerland. Nalkowska was known for her love of nature and animals, and the birds have symbolic significance for the characters themselves. The choucas fly down from the mountain passes seeking food, while some of the characters in the novel wander around the sanatorium seeking philosophical truths. In Choucas, there is a strong autobiographical element to the story, as Nalkowska had stayed in a sanatorium in Leysin, Switzerland, with her husband in 1925. A comparison may also be drawn with the classic novel by Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924), which has similar themes. The book delineates a fascinating time period, and the author's concise fictional technique is strikingly innovative and groundbreaking. Choucas is a fine example of early modernist literature and is translated for the first time into English for a new generation of readers.
Sergey Gandlevsky's 2002 novel Illegible has a double time focus, centering on the immediate experiences of Lev Krivorotov, a twenty-year-old poet living in Moscow in the 1970s, as well as his retrospective meditations thirty years later after most of his hopes have foundered. As the story begins, Lev is involved in a tortured affair with an older woman and consumed by envy of his more privileged friend and fellow beginner poet Nikita, one of the children of high Soviet functionaries who were known as "golden youth." In both narratives, Krivorotov recounts with regret and self-castigation the failure of a double infatuation, his erotic love for the young student Anya and his artistic love for the poet Viktor Chigrashov. When this double infatuation becomes a romantic triangle, the consequences are tragic. In Illegible, as in his poems, Gandlevsky gives us unparalleled access to the atmosphere of the city of Moscow and the ethos of the late Soviet and post-Soviet era, while at the same time demonstrating the universality of human emotion.
"Herzen's novel played a significant part in the intellectual ferment of the 1840s. It is an important book in social and moral terms, and wonderfully expressive of Herzen's personality."--Isaiah BerlinAlexander Herzen was one of the major figures in Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth century. Who Is to Blame? was his first novel. A revealing document and a noteworthy contribution to Russian literature in its own right, it establishes the origins of Herzen's spiritual quest and the outlines of his emerging social and political beliefs, and it foreshadows his mature philosophical views.
Doug Crandell is a maestro in multiple genres: the author of critically-acclaimed true crime books, devilishly charming memoirs, and tragicomic works of fiction about small-town life that are leavened in equal measure with poignancy and humor. Enter They're Calling You Home, Crandell's latest novel. This is the story of Gabriel Burke, a writer who is alienated from everyone he loves for exposing a discomforting family secret in a bestselling memoir. Divorced from his wife, estranged from his daughter, and loathed by his alcoholic brother, Burke must confront all of them when he returns to his hometown in Smallwood, Indiana to chronicle the story of a gruesome mass murder there. Thus begins this intricately woven tale of redemption and forgiveness, of men paying the wages of masculinity, of sons coming to grips with the sins of their fathers, and of one writer grappling with the burdens of journalistic integrity. Throughout this deftly crafted work, secrets present a hall of mirrors through which Burke must constantly navigate: the secret of his father's sex crimes, the furtive steps his family takes to deny them, and the surreptitious efforts of State and local officials as they try and cover up the murder case he's investigating. Part road trip, part who-dunnit, part voyage of self discovery, Crandell's moving novel is ultimately the story of a journey in which the only possible destination is its starting point—home.