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This book presents and comments on four short works of Japanese literature by prominent writers of the early twentieth century, including Natsume Sōseki and Miyazawa Kenji. These are their first-ever published English translations. The book is designed to be used as a textbook for the translation of modern Japanese literature—another first. Each chapter introduces the writer and his work, presents the original Japanese text in its entirety, and encourages students with advanced Japanese to make their own translation of it, before reading the author’s translation that follows. The detailed commentary section in each chapter focuses on two stylistic issues that characterise the source text, and how the target text—the translation—has dealt with them, before the chapter concludes with questions for further discussion and analysis.
Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud’s famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan’s many years of relative isolation, followed by its multicultural empire, these themes seem particularly ripe for exploration and exploitation by Japanese writers. Their literary adventures have taken them inside Japan as well as outside, and how they internalized the exotic through the adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter forms the primary subject of this book. The Alien Within is the first book-length thematic study in English of the alien in modern Japanese literature and helps shed new light on a number of important authors. Morton examines the Gothic, a form of writing with strong affinities to European Gothic and a motif in the fiction of several key modern Japanese writers, such as Arishima Takeo. Morton also discusses the translations of Tsubouchi Shoyo, Japan’s most famous early translator of Shakespeare, and how this most alien and exotic author was absorbed into the Japanese literary and theatrical tradition. The new field of translation theory and how it relates to translating Shakespeare are also discussed. Morton devotes two chapters to the celebrated female poet Yosano Akiko, whose verse on childbirth and her unborn children broke taboos relating to the expression of the female body and sensibility. He also highlights the writing of contemporary Okinawan novelist Oshiro Tatsuhiro, whose work springs from what is for Japanese an exotic subtropical landscape and makes symbolic reference to the otherness at the heart of Japanese religiosity. Another significant but equally overlooked subject is the focus of the final chapter, which analyzes the travel writing of internationally best-selling author Murakami Haruki. Murakami’s great corpus of work includes a one-volume study of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which Morton discusses in detail. The Alien Within breaks new ground in its treatment of the exotic in modern Japanese writing and in its discussion of authors and work hitherto absent from critical discussions in English. It will be of significant interest to readers of literature and students of modern Japanese culture and women’s writing as well as those fascinated by the occult, Gothic fiction, and the exotic.
This book offers the first cultural history of translation in Japan during the Tokugawa period, 1600-1868.
This is the first encyclopedia in the Scribner Writers Series to focus on Asian writers and genres. It highlights 25 of the most widely translated Japanese authors, such as Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, Junichiro Tanizaki and Fumiko Enchi.
In The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry, Scott Mehl analyzes the complex response of Meiji-era Japanese poets and readers to the challenge introduced by European verse and the resulting crisis in Japanese poetry. Amidst fierce competition for literary prestige on the national and international stage, poets and critics at the time recognized that the character of Japanese poetic culture was undergoing a fundamental transformation, and the stakes were high: the future of modern Japanese verse. Mehl documents the creation of new Japanese poetic forms, tracing the first invention of Japanese free verse and its subsequent disappearance. He examines the impact of the acclaimed and reviled shintaishi, a new poetic form invented for translating European-language verse and eventually supplanted by the reintroduction of free verse as a Western import. The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry draws on materials written in German, Spanish, English, and French, recreating the global poetry culture within which the most ambitious Meiji-era Japanese poets vied for position.
Winner of the Kobayashi Hideo Award, The Fall of Language in the Age of English lays bare the struggle to retain the brilliance of one's own language in this period of English-language dominance. Born in Tokyo but raised and educated in the United States, Minae Mizumura acknowledges the value of a universal language in the pursuit of knowledge yet also embraces the different ways of understanding offered by multiple tongues. She warns against losing this precious diversity. Universal languages have always played a pivotal role in advancing human societies, Mizumura shows, but in the globalized world of the Internet, English is fast becoming the sole common language of humanity. The process is unstoppable, and striving for total language equality is delusional—and yet, particular kinds of knowledge can be gained only through writings in specific languages. Mizumura calls these writings "texts" and their ultimate form "literature." Only through literature and, more fundamentally, through the diverse languages that give birth to a variety of literatures, can we nurture and enrich humanity. Incorporating her own experiences as a writer and a lover of language and embedding a parallel history of Japanese, Mizumura offers an intimate look at the phenomena of individual and national expression.
A great story can lead a reader on a journey of discovery—especially if it's presented in two languages! Beautifully illustrated in a traditional style, Japanese Stories for Language Learners offers five compelling stories with English and Japanese language versions appearing on facing pages. Taking learners on an exciting cultural and linguistic journey, each story is followed by detailed translator's notes, Japanese vocabulary lists, and grammar points along with a set of discussion questions and exercises. The first two stories are very famous traditional Japanese folktales: Urashima Taro (Tale of a Fisherman) and Yuki Onna (The Snow Woman). These are followed by three short stories by notable 20th century authors: Kumo no Ito (The Spider's Thread) by Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927) Oborekaketa Kyodai (The Siblings Who Almost Drowned) by Arishima Takeo (1878-1923) Serohiki no Goshu (Gauche the Cellist) by Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933) Reading these stories in the original Japanese script--and hearing native-speakers read them aloud in the accompanying free audio recording--helps students at every level deepen their comprehension of the beauty and subtlety of the Japanese language. Learn Japanese the fun way—through the country's rich literary history.
Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909) is widely regarded as the founder of the modern Japanese novel. His novel Floating Clouds (1887-1889) was written in a colloquial narrative style that was unprecedented in Japanese literature, as was its negative hero. Futabatei was also a pioneer translator of Russian literature, translating works by Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky and others - his translations had an enormous impact (perhaps even greater than his novels) on the development of Japanese literature. In this groundbreaking work, Hiroko Cockerill analyses the development of Futabatei's translation style and the influence of his work as a translator on his own writing. She takes us on a journey through Russian and Japanese literature, throwing light on the development of Japanese literary language, particularly in its use of verb forms to convey notions of tense and aspect that were embedded in European languages. Cockerill finds that Futabatei developed not one, but two distinctive styles, based on the influences of Turgenev and Gogol. While the influence of his translations from Turgenev was immediate and far-reaching, his more Gogolian translations are fascinating in their own right, and contemporary translators would do well to revisit them.
The memoirs of Seidensticker, perhaps best know for his translations of modern and classical Japanese novels, including the 11th century Tale of Genji. Seidensticker was introduced to Japan as a young diplomat during the Allied occupation and remained in Tokyo afterwards, befriending many of the luminaries of the Japanese literary scene. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The acclaimed debut of Japan’s “master storyteller” (Chicago Tribune). With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Banana Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father) Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart. In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, Kitchen and its companion story, Moonlight Shadow, are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul. “Lucid, earnest and disarming . . . [It] seizes hold of the reader’s sympathy and refuses to let go.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times