S&M for the Ivory Tower

My parents and grandfather have a comfortable routine at home where they eat dinner, do dishes, watch one episode of a television show on a rented DVD, and head down to bed. It's very homey and companionable.

The only difficulty is in finding a television show that all three of them can watch. My grandfather is a little more deaf than he likes to admit, so it has to either have English subtitles or be blasted at "oh, the poor neighbors"-level volume (usually, both). It can't have any sex in it or it offends my mother and grandfather's sensibilities. A certain level of violence is acceptable, but anything graphic or upsetting is too much for my mother.

One of the sort-of compromises we occasionally watch is Law and Order, and in a recent episode, I found a surprising cultural reference.

Detective Whatever-His-Name was investigating a neuroscientist who became obsessed with a serial killer she was studying, and he searched her apartment for evidence that she was in a sadomasochistic, submissive relationship with him. The evidence he found?

A Yukio Mishima novel, which he called "domination porno for intellectuals."


I love that not only did mainstream American popular culture make a Japanese literature reference, they got it totally right.

"Talent"; or, "Why Japan?"

Extra points for anyone who can recognize any of the authors in the photographs in this post! As a hint, I have named each file after a work of theirs... in Japanese, for extra challenge.

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Seamus Heaney recently visited our school, and our campus weekly magazine interviewed him. A question and answer that I found particularly interesting:

FM: With [the Nobel Prize in Literature], you join the ranks of fellow Irishmen William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw. What do you think is behind Ireland's rich literary tradition?

SH: I don't know the answer to that, really. I don't believe that sociological conditions produce the oddity of talent. Talent is unpredictable. But it does seem to flourish when societies are in search of definition.

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It's a bit frightening to think of it this way, but I've been studying Japanese literature (with varying degrees of interest and competence) for nearly eight years now, all of high school and all of college. The process has been at times bumpy but always fascinating and always rewarding, and I like to think that I've come out on the other end of this journey a better person in some ways.

While I hate to admit it, from a normal person's point of view, Japanese literature is a somewhat obscure topic. And the natural question that people ask when it is revealed that I spend so much time studying something so weird and useless is:

"Why Japan?"

I don't have a good scholarly answer for this, but I have a sincere answer. (Sincerity is a rather rare commodity around here, so please appreciate this.)

Japan had an experience of modernity so unusual as to deserve to be called unique. Far more than Western nations, Japan had a visceral sense of modernity and modern society coming from outside, being something alien to itself. The process of modernizing was so drastically accelerated that it produced vast, weird fractures in people's understanding of the world around them. This is why so much early Japanese literature is obsessively concerned with tradition and modernity.

The Japanese experience of the social forces that affected the rest of the developed world during the 20th century was also wildly exaggerated--socialist labor movements--an incredibly brilliant flowering of popular rights, democracy, and liberalism--militarism and fascism--being both perpetrator and victim of some of the most horrific military actions of the modern world--the experience of being an occupied nation--the most sudden and dramatic economic growth imaginable--the unbelievable pace of technological development--extreme urban spaces--and now a crippling demographic transition (少子高齢化).

This is so simplistic and reductive that I'm almost embarrassed to admit to it, but this really is what I think--that the experiences of modernity and postmodernity have been somehow traumatic for people in developed nations. Our perception of our current experience as somehow severed from our past and the sinister ways we view modern life (pervasive fear and demonization of urban space and technology) suggest, simply put, that we are not comfortable in the world we live in.

To me, that is the power of Japanese literature. The Japanese historical experience of all of these changes and dislocations and traumas has been almost uniformly extreme, and so Japanese literature bears the scars of modernity very clearly. More than most other "national literatures" (I recognize that the term is deeply problematic, forgive me), Japanese literature touches directly on the issues that are the most painful and intimate for, I think, everyone living in a developed nation today. We are all in, as Heaney said, "societies in search of definition."

I have always wondered if I would be just as fulfilled studying, say, Irish literature, or African literature, or even Chinese literature. Does it matter that it's Japan?--yes, yes, it decisively does. Choosing Japanese literature was not arbitrary for me. I won't say it answers my questions, but it asks the same questions as I do.

Translation

Today I happened upon an example of inexcusably and hilariously poor translation. I recognize that translating poetry is very difficult, and this is an admirable effort presumably by a very accomplished and scholarly gentleman, but still--no excuses. Take a gander at this excerpt:

Our high-pooped barge glides by the marge
Of tributary flume:
Breasting the maze of floods we raise
A crest of creamy spume.
--from "Lines on the Autumn Wind," Liu Che, translator (fortunately) unknown to me

Even ignoring its awkward archaicism and near-incomprehensibility, this is a prime example of tone-deaf English. "high-pooped"?? "creamy spume"?!?!
For shame, translator, for shame.

(tee hee. 'creamy spume')

Favorite Poem Project

The 39th Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, began the Favorite Poem Project in 1997. He asked Americans to submit their favorite poems and, in the course of one year, received over 18,000 submissions.

I find this concept delightful and charming, like sending messages with pigeons or planting a sapling on a birthday. Still, I don't often read poems; they seem melodramatic and self-important. And too many bad poets try to do with poetry what prose can accomplish with greater economy. I do have some favorites -- Alexander Pushkin's I Loved You Once, ee cumings' i carry your heart, Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred -- but I like them because of what they say, not how they choose to say it (though I must concede that, due of the very nature of poetry, it's never entirely possible to divorce the content of a poem from its form).

But here's a poem -- a saccharine and painfully earnest poem -- that I love for its grandeur, for how beautifully it reads:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or so softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

-- Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty

For more on the Favorite Poem Project, click here.

My thesis, part 1

Since this blog is supposed to keep a record of our lives, it's only fair that I introduce the terrible preoccupation that rules my life: my senior thesis.

Nancy and I both major in East Asian Studies, which doesn't require seniors to write theses; nonetheless, out of a combination (you can decide in what proportions) of profound intellectual passion, hunger for glory, and foolhardiness, we are both writing theses this year.

It's only September, the year is young, and crushing reality hasn't set in yet, so I'm still wildly in love with my thesis. Let me introduce it to you! Here is a brief description I filed in a form yesterday:

I will investigate the use of classical Japanese literature in Enchi Fumiko's work and how it relates to what Nina Cornyetz calls her "literary configuration of femaleness." The center of the thesis will be a translation of selected essays about The Tale of Genji from Enchi's Genji monogatari shiken. Through her nonfiction writings about the Genji, I aim to clarify the role of classical Japanese literature within her oeuvre and specifically her work about gender. Finally, I will attempt to put Enchi's use of classical Japanese sources in the context of gender theory, 20th century Japanese feminism, and the similar literary efforts of her peers.

What makes this project so exciting to me, at least in part, is the way it pulls together so many of the disparate threads of my academic career here. Translation is, of course, my current passion and one of the things I want to work toward in my post-college life. I've written term papers on Enchi in both my sophomore and junior years. And Genji itself is my shameless obsession--I've taken two seminars on it, I learned classical Japanese to read it, I've hunted down art, plays, movies, and literature based on it, and I am basically an enormous dork about it.

This thesis lets me play in all of my sandboxes at once. Through one project, I can deal with gender theory, feminism, modern Japanese women's literature, classical Japanese women's literature, Genji studies--everything! It's all still in an embryonic stage, but I love it so much already!

(P.S.: In Rachel Opera Project News, Berg's Wozzeck is still totally eluding me, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin was pretty dull, and I've given in and am now listening to Britten's Billy Budd. Because I love Benjamin Britten. A lot. I have to say, the Opera Project is actually increasing my quality of life quite a bit.)