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Title: Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900 by Haruo Shirane ISBN: 0-231-10990-3 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 August, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $73.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: From Early Paths to Highways and Byways
Comment:
Haruo Shirane has given us a new and at once deeper and broader look at "early modern" Japanese literature than was previously possible. This is the first attempt at a gathering of the riches available in English translation--with many new translations made for this volume--since Donald Keene's landmark *Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century* published half a century ago (1955, to be precise). Whereas Keene's volume attempted to sketch well over a millennium in less than 450 pages, Shirane's spends more than 1000 larger pages on just three centuries: about a quarter of the time period represented in Keene's work covered in about three times the space.
The core and plan of Shirane's anthology revolves around the speedy and often jumpy evolution of literally dozens of genres of popular literature amidst a continuing reverence for and attempts to adapt the fundamentals of classical Heian, medieval Japanese, and Chinese culture to the new plebeian situation of Tokugawa Japan. The scores of complex and detailed introductions and sometimes minute examples (often two or three of one-page or less) initially seem like the work of too many designers and far more colors than a single tapestry could support. (At 108 rather smaller pages devoted to the same period, and containing reference to only a handful of genres, Keene's earlier anthology barely scratches the Tokugawa surface.)
Understandably, Keene's treatment of Tokugawa literature was brief, and concentrated on more accessible genres that needed less background information for at least a beginning appreciation. Shirane's work, of necessity, gives almost equal weight to background and translations. Without the background so supplied, how could the student with a limited knowledge of world literatures begin to approach a range that includes such genres as: stories from the pleasure quarters of Edo, the poetics of Japan's unique linked poetry, a puppet theater that rivals Shakespeare for depth but is steeped in Japanese and Chinese folklore and thinly veiled contemporary events rather than great moments of history, Japan's own versions of Confucian wisdom, competing poetries of leisured literati and barely literate carters and shop clerks, the beginnings of several types of genre fiction, a resurgence of poetry in older Japanese and Sino-Japanese genres, and a new modern type of oral literature for the masses, not to mention the still only somewhat familiar haiku and less familiar haikai prose with their own radical shifts in content and style from one generation to the next?
Make no mistake: Shirane's *Early Modern Japanese Literature* has pages and pages that offer enjoyable reading, but it is still a textbook, designed for those who wish to appreciate and learn something about not only specific works and their authors, but where each fits in the overall tapestry of Japanese and world literature. The book's extraordinary range and depth give the astute reader a better opportunity for that than any group of a half-dozen or more books I can think of. Taking advantage of the next two generations of scholars building on Keene's first attempts at a path through unexplored territory, Shirane has built a network of highways and byways that will take the reader into unsuspected corners of a new and burgeoning country.
Rating: 1
Summary: an awful book
Comment: First of all, this is not the first anthology of Edo literature in English, as the blurb claims. Donald Keene beat them to the punch on that one.
This volume is filled with horrible translations, chock full of typos, factual mistakes, mistranslations, and inconsistencies (on every page, I'm sure). Some books are a pleasure to read. This is the complete opposite.
It reads like the editor decided to publish after having received the first drafts (perhaps by e-mail) of all of the translations (some of which were appropriated from dead translators--no respect for them!--and mercilessly edited to fit stylistically with the mush that fills the rest of the volume). I hope that this is the case, for the sake of the reputations of those who contributed. Even if it is not, most of the blame must lie with the editor, who could have done something to patch things up a bit.
Most of the introductory essays are self-contradictory, confusing, and don't have anything interesting to say. This volume, if anyone takes it seriously, will be a black mark on the credibility of the Columbia Press; it makes me wonder about the quality of other anthologies (for instance, the Chinese literature anthology) in areas in which I am less qualified to make my own judgments.
Not recommended.
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