Second of two parts In this concluding segment (Part I appeared last week), Lynne E. Riggs, translator of Shishi Bunroku's novel of postwar Tokyo, "Jiyu Gakko" (1951; English version, "School of Freedom," 2006), discusses the process of translation. Let's look at the book's opening. It introduces ...
Shishi Bunroku (the pen name of Iwata Toyoo) is a writer who deserves to be better known. His novel "Jiyu Gakko (School of Freedom)" was a best seller when it first appeared in 1951, and gives as vivid a picture as we're likely to ...
It's a strange world we're about to enter. If I were the organizing type I would set up a "Heian Society." In flowing robes and court caps, we would compose pun-laden poems simultaneously lamenting and celebrating the transience of life and beauty. Wine would flow, ...
The fascination of the Heian Period (794-1185) lies in the fact that in all world history there is nothing quite like it. It would be hard to imagine a culture more exclusive, more fastidiously refined, more smugly incurious about the unknown, more unwarlike, more ...
Michael Hoffman delves deep into the carnal history of these islands from the Age of the Gods to the lovelands and soaplands of today In the beginning, there was sex. This is true of Japan, though not of Judaeo-Christian and Islamic cultures, whose one God, the ...
Insight, fate and human frailties intermingle in this love story for winter from the pen of MICHAEL HOFFMAN You'd probably recognize me if you saw me. I'm on TV a lot; a fortuneteller is a good draw, and talkshow hosts are always happy to get ...
One of the great pleasures of life in a country not your own is savoring its literature in the original language. The first Japanese people I ever knew were characters in novels, who all (very kindly) spoke to me in my language, since I ...
This story is part of a package on Confucius. The introduction is here. "The Analects" and other Confucian texts were brought to Japan by the Korean envoy and scholar Wani in the fourth or fifth century A.D., some 800 years after Confucius' death. Buddhist sutras ...
Is what Confucius said true? Can music, poetry and decorum govern the world? Do rulers, by cultivating benevolence in themselves, plant benevolence in their subjects, and harmony in the polity? The chaos of our time hardly invites us to take such notions seriously. But ...
This story is part of a package on Confucius. The introduction is here. Is Confucius dead? He walked the Earth more than 2,500 years ago, his thinking focused even then on the remote past. Why bother with him today? The eminence of his name, combined with aspects ...
