Here's the latest in a series of Christmas cartoons I've been sending out to friends.
Addition: My latest Christmas Cartoon
Here's the latest in a series of Christmas cartoons I've been sending out to friends.
Japan, A Short History
by Mikiso Hane
2000, Oneworld, Oxford
30 January 2007 . Pages 1-70 of 212.
I get really carried away sometimes wanting to take in a lot of information, dipping into way too many books at one time. This is especially true when I’m working on a book or play. I want to create a broad base of knowledge for myself because I like books by authors who seem to be geniuses, such as Thomas Pynchon, Gore Vidal or Norman Rush. Never mind that I’m hindered with being a slow reader with an only moderately retentive memory. Never mind that as I’ve grown up, I realize these writers often trip themselves up on their own erudition; still, there’s something in me that feels a novel should be a vast collage of facts and ideas from many different disciplines. So I’ll go to the library and grab a lot of books off the shelf. When I was less mature, I’d have grabbed some ancient, voluminous history of Japan, which would probably have been jammed from preface to appendix with raw data. But wanting to keep my sanity, I know that it’s a wiser first step to go with a book like Mikiso Hane’s, which is at least manageable that you can get through it and feel you still have time left over for having a life.
Of course, a book like this requires a lot of concentration and a lot of imagination. You can’t drop a stitch. For the novice, every concept and historical figure is new, so you have to keep close track of them all as they're introduced. What’s a Shοen, who were the Takugawa, and what roles did the two play in relation to the Bakufu? Blink and you’ll miss the definitions, and so you have to either be constantly flipping back or you have to make the compromise of skimming forward and just getting an intuitive overview of the shape of the thing. Maybe that’s the most productive way to approach a book like this: even if you’re not trying to memorize the entire labyrinth of Japanese history, you get a sense of the ball game of history, the way that chaotic free-for-alls resolve into stable hegemonies, and the way these hegemonies decay. Some interesting things to me so far have been: the fact that even though the Japanese have long viewed the Emperor as a godlike figure, he’s usually had very little real power; the early conversion of hundreds of thousands of Japanese to Christianity; the plight of the peasantry, which suffered famines so harsh that mass cannibalism may have occurred; the Confucian-influenced caste-system, which included an “untouchable” caste called the burakumin; and the various sects and divisions of Buddhism, including Mahayana, which focuses on the compassionate Bodhisattvas, the Nichiren Sect, which extolled the power of meditative chanting, and the Jodo school, which believed that merely by saying the name of a gracious Bodhisattva, Amida, with true devotion, one can gain salvation. I do wish that there were more attention given to art and culture. We get a quote from Hokusai and learn that Hiroshige was a master of depicting the various different effects of light, but it seems that in order to put art into its own perspective you have to somehow approach the artist’s own inner conflicts and social relationships with the same attention you pay to the intrigues that take place between the samurai and the imperial court.
(The brief description of Hiroshige made me take a good look at a set of postcards of his prints, compiled out by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and published by Pomegranate in San Francisco. It’s definitely worth looking at. I especially enjoy the way he’ll often put objects in the extreme foreground, as though the viewer’s face is just inches away from them. For instance, one scene is a rice paddy as viewed through the gaps in a stand of irises; in another scene, a descending raptor fills the top of the picture and the remainder of the scene is a distant, snowy landscape.)
18 February 2007, pp. 70-136
As history progresses toward the present, Mikiso Hane seems more in his element. This is especially true of the social history of Japan, i.e., the conditions of abject poverty endured by many. The section about factory workers during the late Meiji Era is a study in brutality, and it ought to ring a bell for people today who get a little anxious with the way “globalization” seems primarily to be about the dismantling of social safety nets. The section on factory workers takes us on a guided tour through some of the vicious cycles and catch-22s that characterize the condition of workers in that time. The system described seems not just unfair and dishonest, but also intentionally sadistic. High rates of injury in factories were blamed on workers’ “carelessness.” Workers with cholera were sometimes burned alive. Contrast this with the obscenely wealthy zaibatsu (basically the dominant corporate interests in Japan at the time) and you begin to see the scope of the economic tensions at play.
The subject of labor history brings up the subject of another book I read recently, Thomas Pynchon’s "Against the Day", which focuses largely on the frictions between a Colorado mining family and the family of plutocrats who set out to cause their downfall. If you’re not a fan of Pynchon you can skip this paragraph. What struck me about Day is that Pynchon, who tends to revel in ambiguity and intellectual game playing has come down so solidly on the side of the workers and anarchists of the period. Pynchon’s historical fiction is a lot more fun than a lot of the “straight” stuff that’s out there because he presents conspiracy theories, tabloid hoaxes and pure invention on the same footing as “legitimate” fact, and he does so for a good purpose: to take away the drab shroud of dignity that we usually bring to the past in literature. But in Against the Day, Pynchon seems much more careful about preserving some dignity when it comes to the workers’ movement at the turn-of-the-century. He does this, I think, because he sees this part of history as the bedrock reality, and the story of presidencies, the rise and fall of economic and cultural institutions, and even the progress of science more as fictions and myths that may be freely tampered with. Furthermore, the sweeping “global” aspect of the book that seems to have annoyed so many readers seems to turn things inside out and show us that history might be easier understood if we see the most exploited and oppressed peoples as composing a cohesive, underlying fabric whose wholeness is compromised and distorted by the patterns of nationality and hierarchy that are stitched on from above. That’s a clunky description on my part; suffice it to say that because of Pynchon’s book, I’m looking for different things in Mikiso Hane’s book than I would have otherwise.
The no-nonsense style of the book (no illustrations, no maps, very little biographical background and only a handful of illustrative quotes from the people involved) is necessary to keep the book slim and manageable, but it does make it hard to keep track of the many players who seemed to act as midwives to the transition of Japan from a feudalistic to a more modern government. I wonder if this might not be more appropriate to our era: after all, with internet access as long as you have at your disposal names such as Okubo Toshimichi and Yamagata Aritomo, all you need to do is type in the name and you’ll have a wealth of graphic information right on your screen. Will printed histories evolve towards simply being repositories of keywords that can be looked up online for further details?
One other thing to say is that once the Meiji Era starts, the coverage of artistic and intellectual developments becomes much more comprehensive and interesting. The description of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s disturbing Jigokumon (The Hell Screen) is enough to make me want to seek the story out on my next trip to the library.
14 March 2007: p. 136 to end.
Hane has written some other history books, some of which deal with postwar Japanese history. His short history shows how differently he regards the story before and after the war. Before the war, whether we’re talking about prehistory, the days of the shogun, or the battles of WWII, all questions are essentially answered. After the war, however, mysteries still exist. Why did Japan become such an economic powerhouse? What is the relationship between Japanese corporations and yakuza?
This isn’t intellectual dishonesty; it’s a matter of perspective. From the point of a historian of recent events, bygone centuries have to stand as a pedestal upon which our own period must stand that we might view it. What’s amazing is that Hane has managed to look back so far, and tell the story in such detail. He’s not exactly consistent: each period has its own focus, based on what he thinks is the most significant arena of development. But overall, we get an amazing glimpse of how a student of history can trace lines of cause and event from the oldest available archaeological data to the present day without exhausting his or her mortal capacity.
I like the way that Hane affords himself a single sentence of punditry and commentary when he notes that the militarists and nationalists who led the charge into WWII and who sent soldiers to war sat safe in Tokyo while their soldiers die, as leaders during war almost always do.
And it’s interesting to see the way that many of those people and forces who led the nation into war managed to slip back into power once the war was over—although alliegences had changed (in line with the new Cold War) and progress had been made on issues such as suffrage for women.
One thing that’s missing from the book is a study of the environmental side of Japan’s history, which is a shame because Japan faces so many challenges that force it to walk an ecological tightrope that other industrialized nations have not been forced to.
2000, Oneworld, Oxford
30 January 2007 . Pages 1-70 of 212.
I get really carried away sometimes wanting to take in a lot of information, dipping into way too many books at one time. This is especially true when I’m working on a book or play. I want to create a broad base of knowledge for myself because I like books by authors who seem to be geniuses, such as Thomas Pynchon, Gore Vidal or Norman Rush. Never mind that I’m hindered with being a slow reader with an only moderately retentive memory. Never mind that as I’ve grown up, I realize these writers often trip themselves up on their own erudition; still, there’s something in me that feels a novel should be a vast collage of facts and ideas from many different disciplines. So I’ll go to the library and grab a lot of books off the shelf. When I was less mature, I’d have grabbed some ancient, voluminous history of Japan, which would probably have been jammed from preface to appendix with raw data. But wanting to keep my sanity, I know that it’s a wiser first step to go with a book like Mikiso Hane’s, which is at least manageable that you can get through it and feel you still have time left over for having a life.
Of course, a book like this requires a lot of concentration and a lot of imagination. You can’t drop a stitch. For the novice, every concept and historical figure is new, so you have to keep close track of them all as they're introduced. What’s a Shοen, who were the Takugawa, and what roles did the two play in relation to the Bakufu? Blink and you’ll miss the definitions, and so you have to either be constantly flipping back or you have to make the compromise of skimming forward and just getting an intuitive overview of the shape of the thing. Maybe that’s the most productive way to approach a book like this: even if you’re not trying to memorize the entire labyrinth of Japanese history, you get a sense of the ball game of history, the way that chaotic free-for-alls resolve into stable hegemonies, and the way these hegemonies decay. Some interesting things to me so far have been: the fact that even though the Japanese have long viewed the Emperor as a godlike figure, he’s usually had very little real power; the early conversion of hundreds of thousands of Japanese to Christianity; the plight of the peasantry, which suffered famines so harsh that mass cannibalism may have occurred; the Confucian-influenced caste-system, which included an “untouchable” caste called the burakumin; and the various sects and divisions of Buddhism, including Mahayana, which focuses on the compassionate Bodhisattvas, the Nichiren Sect, which extolled the power of meditative chanting, and the Jodo school, which believed that merely by saying the name of a gracious Bodhisattva, Amida, with true devotion, one can gain salvation. I do wish that there were more attention given to art and culture. We get a quote from Hokusai and learn that Hiroshige was a master of depicting the various different effects of light, but it seems that in order to put art into its own perspective you have to somehow approach the artist’s own inner conflicts and social relationships with the same attention you pay to the intrigues that take place between the samurai and the imperial court.
(The brief description of Hiroshige made me take a good look at a set of postcards of his prints, compiled out by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and published by Pomegranate in San Francisco. It’s definitely worth looking at. I especially enjoy the way he’ll often put objects in the extreme foreground, as though the viewer’s face is just inches away from them. For instance, one scene is a rice paddy as viewed through the gaps in a stand of irises; in another scene, a descending raptor fills the top of the picture and the remainder of the scene is a distant, snowy landscape.)
18 February 2007, pp. 70-136
As history progresses toward the present, Mikiso Hane seems more in his element. This is especially true of the social history of Japan, i.e., the conditions of abject poverty endured by many. The section about factory workers during the late Meiji Era is a study in brutality, and it ought to ring a bell for people today who get a little anxious with the way “globalization” seems primarily to be about the dismantling of social safety nets. The section on factory workers takes us on a guided tour through some of the vicious cycles and catch-22s that characterize the condition of workers in that time. The system described seems not just unfair and dishonest, but also intentionally sadistic. High rates of injury in factories were blamed on workers’ “carelessness.” Workers with cholera were sometimes burned alive. Contrast this with the obscenely wealthy zaibatsu (basically the dominant corporate interests in Japan at the time) and you begin to see the scope of the economic tensions at play.
The subject of labor history brings up the subject of another book I read recently, Thomas Pynchon’s "Against the Day", which focuses largely on the frictions between a Colorado mining family and the family of plutocrats who set out to cause their downfall. If you’re not a fan of Pynchon you can skip this paragraph. What struck me about Day is that Pynchon, who tends to revel in ambiguity and intellectual game playing has come down so solidly on the side of the workers and anarchists of the period. Pynchon’s historical fiction is a lot more fun than a lot of the “straight” stuff that’s out there because he presents conspiracy theories, tabloid hoaxes and pure invention on the same footing as “legitimate” fact, and he does so for a good purpose: to take away the drab shroud of dignity that we usually bring to the past in literature. But in Against the Day, Pynchon seems much more careful about preserving some dignity when it comes to the workers’ movement at the turn-of-the-century. He does this, I think, because he sees this part of history as the bedrock reality, and the story of presidencies, the rise and fall of economic and cultural institutions, and even the progress of science more as fictions and myths that may be freely tampered with. Furthermore, the sweeping “global” aspect of the book that seems to have annoyed so many readers seems to turn things inside out and show us that history might be easier understood if we see the most exploited and oppressed peoples as composing a cohesive, underlying fabric whose wholeness is compromised and distorted by the patterns of nationality and hierarchy that are stitched on from above. That’s a clunky description on my part; suffice it to say that because of Pynchon’s book, I’m looking for different things in Mikiso Hane’s book than I would have otherwise.
The no-nonsense style of the book (no illustrations, no maps, very little biographical background and only a handful of illustrative quotes from the people involved) is necessary to keep the book slim and manageable, but it does make it hard to keep track of the many players who seemed to act as midwives to the transition of Japan from a feudalistic to a more modern government. I wonder if this might not be more appropriate to our era: after all, with internet access as long as you have at your disposal names such as Okubo Toshimichi and Yamagata Aritomo, all you need to do is type in the name and you’ll have a wealth of graphic information right on your screen. Will printed histories evolve towards simply being repositories of keywords that can be looked up online for further details?
One other thing to say is that once the Meiji Era starts, the coverage of artistic and intellectual developments becomes much more comprehensive and interesting. The description of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s disturbing Jigokumon (The Hell Screen) is enough to make me want to seek the story out on my next trip to the library.
14 March 2007: p. 136 to end.
Hane has written some other history books, some of which deal with postwar Japanese history. His short history shows how differently he regards the story before and after the war. Before the war, whether we’re talking about prehistory, the days of the shogun, or the battles of WWII, all questions are essentially answered. After the war, however, mysteries still exist. Why did Japan become such an economic powerhouse? What is the relationship between Japanese corporations and yakuza?
This isn’t intellectual dishonesty; it’s a matter of perspective. From the point of a historian of recent events, bygone centuries have to stand as a pedestal upon which our own period must stand that we might view it. What’s amazing is that Hane has managed to look back so far, and tell the story in such detail. He’s not exactly consistent: each period has its own focus, based on what he thinks is the most significant arena of development. But overall, we get an amazing glimpse of how a student of history can trace lines of cause and event from the oldest available archaeological data to the present day without exhausting his or her mortal capacity.
I like the way that Hane affords himself a single sentence of punditry and commentary when he notes that the militarists and nationalists who led the charge into WWII and who sent soldiers to war sat safe in Tokyo while their soldiers die, as leaders during war almost always do.
And it’s interesting to see the way that many of those people and forces who led the nation into war managed to slip back into power once the war was over—although alliegences had changed (in line with the new Cold War) and progress had been made on issues such as suffrage for women.
One thing that’s missing from the book is a study of the environmental side of Japan’s history, which is a shame because Japan faces so many challenges that force it to walk an ecological tightrope that other industrialized nations have not been forced to.
Ahab’s Wife, or the Star Gazer
by Sara Jeter Naslund, 1999. Perennial, NY
24 January 2007 – up to page 192 of 666
For me, this book didn’t start to take off until Una Spenser—the title character and the narrator—trades in her button boots for a pair of flat-soled men’s shoes in order to pass herself off as a cabin boy on the ship Sussex. The story of a woman taking on a disguise in order to gain entrance into the restricted world of men is one we’re all with. Una herself, an exceedingly clever young woman, is able to list off a string of examples from literature and history.
The device is so powerful in historical fiction because it’s such a concentrated act of rebellion: by crossing the gender line and putting herself to all the tests of seafaring life, Una defies the prejudice of her age. And because up until this point the character’s mental and emotional development have been so carefully recorded, it’s exciting to see the character enter into a whole sphere of experience that would normally be cut off from her. In order to prove herself to prospective employer Captain Fry, Una must climb to the top of the ship’s rigging, which she readily does, using the strength she gained from climbing the lighthouse on the tiny New England island where she spent her late childhood. As she climbs the rigging, it feels as though not only Una but also Naslund is going through a rite of passage, a transition from one style of literature to another. The early sections of the book, dealing with Una’s life at the foot of the lighthouse, represents one style of fiction in which the action is primarily in the mind. We witness Una’s psychological development, enjoy watching her exploration of the senses and her evolving sense of her connection to others and of her own mortality. It’s the realm of Jane Austen, and as with Austin’s characters, there’s a sense that Una’s intelligence and imagination are enough to give her freedom even within the confines of a cozy and withdrawn domestic life. But there’s also a sense of regret at the fact that Una has to experience so much vicariously. As with Austen’s characters, Una is faced with a romantic choice between two potential suitors, the bookish Giles and his more ruddy and emotional companion Kit. In choosing between them, it’s as though Una also has to admit her limitations, because her choice is between two lives she might only experience vicariously, waiting patiently for them to return to her after their trip to sea on a whaling vessel. And so it’s a palpable relief when she simply cuts the Gordian knot and joins the crew of the same vessel.
I’m interested in this idea that there are two parallel literatures, one for men and one for women. Clearly, this is true of juvenile books—Tom Swift is for boys, Little Women is for girls. The same divide exists in adult literature, but we’re a little less comfortable speaking about it. Moby Dick, which is almost bereft of woman players, is probably the least ambiguously male book you could choose—and yet we’re taught that this book is a classic of universal importance. Little Women? Well, that’s a classic of girl’s fiction, but if a guy doesn’t read it, no one will tell him he’s missing out.
And yet on the other side of the divide, there’s a growing sense that the actual life of literature lies with woman readers and woman authors, and the fact that men tend to have an aversion for things that are “for women” is seen as more an emotional and intellectual handicap than anything else. Let the men stay out at sea, stranded on the doomed Pequod, while the real work and truth of life goes on shoreside.
So the way I see it now is that in writing Ahab’s Wife, Naslund is striking a much deserved blow at the haughty prejudice represented by Moby Dick, but she’s also making a conscious effort to reach out and bridge a divide. Essentially, she’s saying that Herman Melville is still worth reading, that the book is not the moribund repository of stale thinking one might suspect. All it needs is a fresh set of eyes, a fresh population of readers, used to a different tradition and ready to see something that all the scholarly experts have missed.
30 January 2007: pp. 193-242 of 666
What bothered me about the first part of the book was how pristine and utopian everything seemed to be. After a twelve-year-old Una expresses doubt as to God’s existence her fundamentalist Christian father starts acting threateningly toward her. Fortunately, she has an aunt and uncle who are extremely liberal and very kind. They oppose slavery, they don’t slaughter their livestock, they encourage their daughter Frannie to explore the world around her. It corresponds a little too well to the sort of wishes that a late-20th-century humanist would have for the world, but it doesn’t jibe too well with accounts I’ve read about the realities of pre-Civil War progressives, who often mixed a heroic opposition to slavery and support of women’s rights with a dour and constricting Puritanism and an often abortive naïveté when it came to managing their own finances. (For more on this subject, study the history of Oberlin College).
If Una were to go forth from this utopian upbringing like some angel shedding rays of enlightenment into her backward era, teaching valuable life lessons about tolerance to a 19th-Century America just a little too dim to catch on to the blindingly obvious fact that we should all just accept ourselves for who we are, this would be a pretty silly and fluffy book. It almost seems that this will be the case; the Captain of the Sussex seems as enlightened a mariner as one could hope to set sail with. When confronted with the actual business of capturing and slaughtering a whale, Una is revulsed in a way that seems haughty, far too much like the save-the-whales mentality that evolved in later times, far too different from the way Herman Melville’s enthusiasm for all things that had to do with the whaling trade. There’s even a scene where Una and her two suitors, Kit and Giles, are able to steal away below-decks for a late-night faux picnic with stolen wine and cheese. It seems here like the narrative is going to skirt easily away from the tough issues of inhumanity and oppression that confront anyone who looks seriously at the past, if not the present.
But Naslund is playing a more sophisticated game. Having just weathered a rough patch of storm, the ship’s crew lets out a collective sigh of relief. “. . . [R]eally, we felt the need of nothing. . . Nonetheless, we were a whaling ship, and to complete our completeness if that is a possible idea, we began to watch eagerly, again, for a whale.”
In a scene that is (intentionally, I think) almost cribbed from the end of Moby Dick, the ship is destroyed by an enraged whale, and goes down. Three open boats are left out at sea, they get separated. They’re too far from land to have a realistic hope of survival. In the end, Una and her two friends, Giles and Kit, murder their fellow boat-mates and drink their blood to survive. They’re rescued after a month at sea, and come aboard the Albatross, a vessel whose caring crew nurses the castaways back to health in yet another show of civilized compassion—but our heroes can’t forget the evil they’ve partaken in. Eventually, Giles falls from the high rigging and drown. It’s unclear whether it’s suicide or an accident.
It may seem a little twisted to think that this sort of thing should happen. I remember once when I was at a book fair, a potential customer asked me why it was that fiction tends always to be so dark. I’m not sure I understand this myself. A couple of quotes I tend to keep in mind: in the introduction to Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon says that the serious of a book is determined by the way it deals with death. And in his introduction to the short-story collection Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut encourages writers to make terrible things happen to their characters, “So that we can see what they’re made of.”
6 February 2007: pp. 242-456.
I’m afraid that the deeper I get in this book, the more my initial excitement turns to lukewarm appreciation. The breaking point came for me when our protagonist, Una, finally comes together with Ahab after seeing him confess his love and inner torment to the flames of a burning building. Unfortunately, Ahab is due to ship out the next day, so he leaves his newfound wife with a purse full of money and instructions to shop exuberantly. Is this supposed to be a spoof of the modern credit-card-as-therapy genre of fiction? It almost seems so, but the joke doesn’t really bear fruit. In a way, Una’s reaction to coming into wealth is supposed to show that she’s a person whose intellectual refinement is reflected in material taste, much like in Edgar Allen Poe’s essay about interior decorating. But while Poe’s article was meant to stand alone, Una’s new identity as a shopaholic dilutes the tale of passion and self-discovery that this novel had the potential to be.
There are other things that fall short of the mark. For instance, Ahab’s sermon to the flames reads more like a freshman composition on the theme of “What would a sea captain say when he’s in love?” than something that comes from the heart. Likewise, Ahab’s letter to Una from the Pequod is filled with forced references to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and with descriptions of the process of ambergris formation that are more informative but less jazzy and interesting than Ishmael’s dissertations about all things aquatic in Moby Dick.
That being said, it’s not as though I feel I’m wasting my time with this book. It’s a good piece of work, and Naslund clearly has something to say about the value of tolerance and kindness. More and more, Una resembles one of those Jane Austin characters who, with her force of wit and maturity, is able to set things straight in the lives of all those around her. She uses her wealth to help set things right with her friend Charlotte, and she acts as a confessor for the troubled bounty hunter David, who guides through the forest and back from Kentucky to Nantucket. Una even learns to overcome her intolerance for religion in order to befriend the escaped slave Susan, who attributes her newfound freedom to divine intervention.
But Una doesn’t have the impetuousness of Emma. Her progress through life seems as calm and well measured as the pace of her narration. At no point do I feel overwhelmed, and feeling overwhelmed is one of my favorite parts about reading good fiction. Whereas Emma seemed so full of vivacity that it was hard to imagine a world that could contain her, Una seems to be in a perpetual process of settling down, even when she comes face-to-face with major hardship. When, on her shopping trip, Una meets up with Margaret Fuller (a real-life historical figure who espoused feminism in the 19th century), you can tell that this is supposed to be a mentor-student relationship, but Fuller seems to have little to impart in terms of real wisdom. All we see is a sort of cosmopolitan aspect of sophistication and a deft command of literary references from various languages.
One of the things that interested me about this book is the possibilities that arise when a modern author “revisits” a classic work of fiction and expands on characters and events that would otherwise have remained marginal. I think the best example of this is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which manages to create a parallel world that both complements that of Hamlet and is capable of standing on its own two feet. So far, Ahab’s Wife is mainly demonstrating that this is a tricky literary feat not everyone’s capable of.
14 February 2007
pp. 456-574
There’s a really interesting part of the book. I’m not completely sure why, but I see it as the best example of what’s wrong with Naslund’s book as a whole. While trying to track down her friend and mentor Margaret Fuller, Una comes afoul of a mysterious figure who, it seems, is Nathaniel Hawthorne. He seems a clownish figure who takes himself far too seriously. When asked what he writes, instead of giving a real answer, he merely quotes a single sentence, completely out of context: “I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.” Una is immediately struck by the sentence. Hawthorne (?) asks her, “What associations does it set to resonating?” And then Una rattles on for about two pages, dissecting every little piece of the sentence, from the coincidental reference to whaling and a woman named Susan (the same name as Una’s best friend) down to the references to love, domesticity and a relationship to nature. Finally, Una goes into a reverie about the sound of the sentence itself, especially the profusions of “s” sounds.
Where to begin? First of all, this seems to be Naslund showing off something special that she’s learned in the academic study of literature. A sentence is actually a jewel box, but it takes a special person to note the richness that lies within. Una, we’re supposed to believe, is this rare sort of person. I think Naslund intends this interchange between Una and Hawthorne to be the sort of thing that young writers will copy down verbatim and turn to whenever they want to remind themselves the true potentials of language and expression, or something like that. Unfortunately, she doesn’t pull it off, not by a long shot. What happens is that the character of Una who was being carefully developed earlier in the novel is compromised and diluted because Naslund wants to show off her idea of what a wonderful, well rounded 19th century woman should have been like. Similarly, when Una meets the father–daughter team of naturalists, the Mitchells, she instantly pops out a couple of impressive sounding observations about the digging habits of squirrels and the weather patterns in Kentucky, observations that she’d made on her own while growing up. We’re supposed to think, What raw talent and potential this young girl had. But what we wind up thinking is: Where did this come from? Since when did Una start caring so much about squirrels and storm patterns?
In another sense, Naslund uses the scene as a criticism of Hawthorne. He’s too puritanical, too mean-spirited. This could be a fair criticism. I haven’t read much Hawthorne, and I don’t know much about him. I do know that he supported Herman Melville in turning Moby Dick into the ambitious project it became, so maybe Naslund is hinting that if not for Hawthorne’s influence, Moby Dick would have been a more sensitive story, more representative of the harmonious balance between humanity and nature that Una supposedly represents.
What I remember about reading Hawthorne is that, while it wasn’t always the most interesting reading, it at least had a sense of tension. As a reader, I moved through dense paragraphs of description because they seemed to fit together into a story that meant something. "The Scarlet Letter," for instance: Descriptions of the woods and old mansions, suits of armor and grim colonial meetings all seemed to come together to form a background that seemed necessary for the main story of hypocrisy and damnation. The language was overwrought, but it seemed to serve a purpose other than drawing attention to its own prettiness.
I think that the central flaw of Ahab’s Wife is in making Una both the main character and the narrator. Not that you can’t have a main character who narrates her own life, but in this book it doesn’t work because Naslund’s intention is to create a sort of paragon of enlightened womanhood. Because Una is telling a story designed to show off her own virtues, she comes off as a vain person who is perhaps dishonest even with herself of her vanity. The idea of grief keeps cropping up in the novel—Una loses her first husband, her mother, her first child. But she never really seems to be hit by the simple pain that real people associate with suffering. Rather, we have long meditations on such things as the ocean and the moon and the stars that seem like attempts to come up with as many frilly, elegant sentences as possible. Grief serves only as an excuse to make pretty metaphors (“Like funeral cloves are these stars, spiky and spicy. Like cloves in an orange, they are the preservers of the skin and of the black flesh of space.”) In real life, of course, grief is something demanding—it can overwhelm us and sap our strength. But if Una was ever overwhelmed by grief, she might seem less perfect and more human, and in the end, it seems like that’s a sacrifice Naslund is not willing to make.
20 February 2007; page 574-end.
There’s not a whole lot I have to add about this book. As the plot progresses, the number of characters who seem nothing but excuses to bring up “interesting” subject matter increases. For example, Una’s friends the Mitchells allow ponderings about astronomy to be added to all the other ponderings that gather like barely used playthings in a storage shed of superfluous metaphor. Characters who once had some promise, such as young cousin Frannie or bounty hunter David Poland, return as lifeless functionaries to whatever purpose Naslund thinks this book serves. The only story that’s really moving is that of Susan, the escaped slave we meet at the beginning of the book. Other than her struggle to reunite with her still enslaved mother, I get the sense that the only thing in this story worth worrying about is Una’s peace of mind, and as even the death of a beloved husband Ahab seems barely to rattle her for a moment from her even keel, I was confident that Una’s peace of mind was never really in question. Near the end of the book Naslund provides a “twist” ending that I won’t give away except to say that no one really cares how much of a twist you put into a limp noodle.
24 January 2007 – up to page 192 of 666
For me, this book didn’t start to take off until Una Spenser—the title character and the narrator—trades in her button boots for a pair of flat-soled men’s shoes in order to pass herself off as a cabin boy on the ship Sussex. The story of a woman taking on a disguise in order to gain entrance into the restricted world of men is one we’re all with. Una herself, an exceedingly clever young woman, is able to list off a string of examples from literature and history.
The device is so powerful in historical fiction because it’s such a concentrated act of rebellion: by crossing the gender line and putting herself to all the tests of seafaring life, Una defies the prejudice of her age. And because up until this point the character’s mental and emotional development have been so carefully recorded, it’s exciting to see the character enter into a whole sphere of experience that would normally be cut off from her. In order to prove herself to prospective employer Captain Fry, Una must climb to the top of the ship’s rigging, which she readily does, using the strength she gained from climbing the lighthouse on the tiny New England island where she spent her late childhood. As she climbs the rigging, it feels as though not only Una but also Naslund is going through a rite of passage, a transition from one style of literature to another. The early sections of the book, dealing with Una’s life at the foot of the lighthouse, represents one style of fiction in which the action is primarily in the mind. We witness Una’s psychological development, enjoy watching her exploration of the senses and her evolving sense of her connection to others and of her own mortality. It’s the realm of Jane Austen, and as with Austin’s characters, there’s a sense that Una’s intelligence and imagination are enough to give her freedom even within the confines of a cozy and withdrawn domestic life. But there’s also a sense of regret at the fact that Una has to experience so much vicariously. As with Austen’s characters, Una is faced with a romantic choice between two potential suitors, the bookish Giles and his more ruddy and emotional companion Kit. In choosing between them, it’s as though Una also has to admit her limitations, because her choice is between two lives she might only experience vicariously, waiting patiently for them to return to her after their trip to sea on a whaling vessel. And so it’s a palpable relief when she simply cuts the Gordian knot and joins the crew of the same vessel.
I’m interested in this idea that there are two parallel literatures, one for men and one for women. Clearly, this is true of juvenile books—Tom Swift is for boys, Little Women is for girls. The same divide exists in adult literature, but we’re a little less comfortable speaking about it. Moby Dick, which is almost bereft of woman players, is probably the least ambiguously male book you could choose—and yet we’re taught that this book is a classic of universal importance. Little Women? Well, that’s a classic of girl’s fiction, but if a guy doesn’t read it, no one will tell him he’s missing out.
And yet on the other side of the divide, there’s a growing sense that the actual life of literature lies with woman readers and woman authors, and the fact that men tend to have an aversion for things that are “for women” is seen as more an emotional and intellectual handicap than anything else. Let the men stay out at sea, stranded on the doomed Pequod, while the real work and truth of life goes on shoreside.
So the way I see it now is that in writing Ahab’s Wife, Naslund is striking a much deserved blow at the haughty prejudice represented by Moby Dick, but she’s also making a conscious effort to reach out and bridge a divide. Essentially, she’s saying that Herman Melville is still worth reading, that the book is not the moribund repository of stale thinking one might suspect. All it needs is a fresh set of eyes, a fresh population of readers, used to a different tradition and ready to see something that all the scholarly experts have missed.
30 January 2007: pp. 193-242 of 666
What bothered me about the first part of the book was how pristine and utopian everything seemed to be. After a twelve-year-old Una expresses doubt as to God’s existence her fundamentalist Christian father starts acting threateningly toward her. Fortunately, she has an aunt and uncle who are extremely liberal and very kind. They oppose slavery, they don’t slaughter their livestock, they encourage their daughter Frannie to explore the world around her. It corresponds a little too well to the sort of wishes that a late-20th-century humanist would have for the world, but it doesn’t jibe too well with accounts I’ve read about the realities of pre-Civil War progressives, who often mixed a heroic opposition to slavery and support of women’s rights with a dour and constricting Puritanism and an often abortive naïveté when it came to managing their own finances. (For more on this subject, study the history of Oberlin College).
If Una were to go forth from this utopian upbringing like some angel shedding rays of enlightenment into her backward era, teaching valuable life lessons about tolerance to a 19th-Century America just a little too dim to catch on to the blindingly obvious fact that we should all just accept ourselves for who we are, this would be a pretty silly and fluffy book. It almost seems that this will be the case; the Captain of the Sussex seems as enlightened a mariner as one could hope to set sail with. When confronted with the actual business of capturing and slaughtering a whale, Una is revulsed in a way that seems haughty, far too much like the save-the-whales mentality that evolved in later times, far too different from the way Herman Melville’s enthusiasm for all things that had to do with the whaling trade. There’s even a scene where Una and her two suitors, Kit and Giles, are able to steal away below-decks for a late-night faux picnic with stolen wine and cheese. It seems here like the narrative is going to skirt easily away from the tough issues of inhumanity and oppression that confront anyone who looks seriously at the past, if not the present.
But Naslund is playing a more sophisticated game. Having just weathered a rough patch of storm, the ship’s crew lets out a collective sigh of relief. “. . . [R]eally, we felt the need of nothing. . . Nonetheless, we were a whaling ship, and to complete our completeness if that is a possible idea, we began to watch eagerly, again, for a whale.”
In a scene that is (intentionally, I think) almost cribbed from the end of Moby Dick, the ship is destroyed by an enraged whale, and goes down. Three open boats are left out at sea, they get separated. They’re too far from land to have a realistic hope of survival. In the end, Una and her two friends, Giles and Kit, murder their fellow boat-mates and drink their blood to survive. They’re rescued after a month at sea, and come aboard the Albatross, a vessel whose caring crew nurses the castaways back to health in yet another show of civilized compassion—but our heroes can’t forget the evil they’ve partaken in. Eventually, Giles falls from the high rigging and drown. It’s unclear whether it’s suicide or an accident.
It may seem a little twisted to think that this sort of thing should happen. I remember once when I was at a book fair, a potential customer asked me why it was that fiction tends always to be so dark. I’m not sure I understand this myself. A couple of quotes I tend to keep in mind: in the introduction to Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon says that the serious of a book is determined by the way it deals with death. And in his introduction to the short-story collection Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut encourages writers to make terrible things happen to their characters, “So that we can see what they’re made of.”
6 February 2007: pp. 242-456.
I’m afraid that the deeper I get in this book, the more my initial excitement turns to lukewarm appreciation. The breaking point came for me when our protagonist, Una, finally comes together with Ahab after seeing him confess his love and inner torment to the flames of a burning building. Unfortunately, Ahab is due to ship out the next day, so he leaves his newfound wife with a purse full of money and instructions to shop exuberantly. Is this supposed to be a spoof of the modern credit-card-as-therapy genre of fiction? It almost seems so, but the joke doesn’t really bear fruit. In a way, Una’s reaction to coming into wealth is supposed to show that she’s a person whose intellectual refinement is reflected in material taste, much like in Edgar Allen Poe’s essay about interior decorating. But while Poe’s article was meant to stand alone, Una’s new identity as a shopaholic dilutes the tale of passion and self-discovery that this novel had the potential to be.
There are other things that fall short of the mark. For instance, Ahab’s sermon to the flames reads more like a freshman composition on the theme of “What would a sea captain say when he’s in love?” than something that comes from the heart. Likewise, Ahab’s letter to Una from the Pequod is filled with forced references to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and with descriptions of the process of ambergris formation that are more informative but less jazzy and interesting than Ishmael’s dissertations about all things aquatic in Moby Dick.
That being said, it’s not as though I feel I’m wasting my time with this book. It’s a good piece of work, and Naslund clearly has something to say about the value of tolerance and kindness. More and more, Una resembles one of those Jane Austin characters who, with her force of wit and maturity, is able to set things straight in the lives of all those around her. She uses her wealth to help set things right with her friend Charlotte, and she acts as a confessor for the troubled bounty hunter David, who guides through the forest and back from Kentucky to Nantucket. Una even learns to overcome her intolerance for religion in order to befriend the escaped slave Susan, who attributes her newfound freedom to divine intervention.
But Una doesn’t have the impetuousness of Emma. Her progress through life seems as calm and well measured as the pace of her narration. At no point do I feel overwhelmed, and feeling overwhelmed is one of my favorite parts about reading good fiction. Whereas Emma seemed so full of vivacity that it was hard to imagine a world that could contain her, Una seems to be in a perpetual process of settling down, even when she comes face-to-face with major hardship. When, on her shopping trip, Una meets up with Margaret Fuller (a real-life historical figure who espoused feminism in the 19th century), you can tell that this is supposed to be a mentor-student relationship, but Fuller seems to have little to impart in terms of real wisdom. All we see is a sort of cosmopolitan aspect of sophistication and a deft command of literary references from various languages.
One of the things that interested me about this book is the possibilities that arise when a modern author “revisits” a classic work of fiction and expands on characters and events that would otherwise have remained marginal. I think the best example of this is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which manages to create a parallel world that both complements that of Hamlet and is capable of standing on its own two feet. So far, Ahab’s Wife is mainly demonstrating that this is a tricky literary feat not everyone’s capable of.
14 February 2007
pp. 456-574
There’s a really interesting part of the book. I’m not completely sure why, but I see it as the best example of what’s wrong with Naslund’s book as a whole. While trying to track down her friend and mentor Margaret Fuller, Una comes afoul of a mysterious figure who, it seems, is Nathaniel Hawthorne. He seems a clownish figure who takes himself far too seriously. When asked what he writes, instead of giving a real answer, he merely quotes a single sentence, completely out of context: “I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.” Una is immediately struck by the sentence. Hawthorne (?) asks her, “What associations does it set to resonating?” And then Una rattles on for about two pages, dissecting every little piece of the sentence, from the coincidental reference to whaling and a woman named Susan (the same name as Una’s best friend) down to the references to love, domesticity and a relationship to nature. Finally, Una goes into a reverie about the sound of the sentence itself, especially the profusions of “s” sounds.
Where to begin? First of all, this seems to be Naslund showing off something special that she’s learned in the academic study of literature. A sentence is actually a jewel box, but it takes a special person to note the richness that lies within. Una, we’re supposed to believe, is this rare sort of person. I think Naslund intends this interchange between Una and Hawthorne to be the sort of thing that young writers will copy down verbatim and turn to whenever they want to remind themselves the true potentials of language and expression, or something like that. Unfortunately, she doesn’t pull it off, not by a long shot. What happens is that the character of Una who was being carefully developed earlier in the novel is compromised and diluted because Naslund wants to show off her idea of what a wonderful, well rounded 19th century woman should have been like. Similarly, when Una meets the father–daughter team of naturalists, the Mitchells, she instantly pops out a couple of impressive sounding observations about the digging habits of squirrels and the weather patterns in Kentucky, observations that she’d made on her own while growing up. We’re supposed to think, What raw talent and potential this young girl had. But what we wind up thinking is: Where did this come from? Since when did Una start caring so much about squirrels and storm patterns?
In another sense, Naslund uses the scene as a criticism of Hawthorne. He’s too puritanical, too mean-spirited. This could be a fair criticism. I haven’t read much Hawthorne, and I don’t know much about him. I do know that he supported Herman Melville in turning Moby Dick into the ambitious project it became, so maybe Naslund is hinting that if not for Hawthorne’s influence, Moby Dick would have been a more sensitive story, more representative of the harmonious balance between humanity and nature that Una supposedly represents.
What I remember about reading Hawthorne is that, while it wasn’t always the most interesting reading, it at least had a sense of tension. As a reader, I moved through dense paragraphs of description because they seemed to fit together into a story that meant something. "The Scarlet Letter," for instance: Descriptions of the woods and old mansions, suits of armor and grim colonial meetings all seemed to come together to form a background that seemed necessary for the main story of hypocrisy and damnation. The language was overwrought, but it seemed to serve a purpose other than drawing attention to its own prettiness.
I think that the central flaw of Ahab’s Wife is in making Una both the main character and the narrator. Not that you can’t have a main character who narrates her own life, but in this book it doesn’t work because Naslund’s intention is to create a sort of paragon of enlightened womanhood. Because Una is telling a story designed to show off her own virtues, she comes off as a vain person who is perhaps dishonest even with herself of her vanity. The idea of grief keeps cropping up in the novel—Una loses her first husband, her mother, her first child. But she never really seems to be hit by the simple pain that real people associate with suffering. Rather, we have long meditations on such things as the ocean and the moon and the stars that seem like attempts to come up with as many frilly, elegant sentences as possible. Grief serves only as an excuse to make pretty metaphors (“Like funeral cloves are these stars, spiky and spicy. Like cloves in an orange, they are the preservers of the skin and of the black flesh of space.”) In real life, of course, grief is something demanding—it can overwhelm us and sap our strength. But if Una was ever overwhelmed by grief, she might seem less perfect and more human, and in the end, it seems like that’s a sacrifice Naslund is not willing to make.
20 February 2007; page 574-end.
There’s not a whole lot I have to add about this book. As the plot progresses, the number of characters who seem nothing but excuses to bring up “interesting” subject matter increases. For example, Una’s friends the Mitchells allow ponderings about astronomy to be added to all the other ponderings that gather like barely used playthings in a storage shed of superfluous metaphor. Characters who once had some promise, such as young cousin Frannie or bounty hunter David Poland, return as lifeless functionaries to whatever purpose Naslund thinks this book serves. The only story that’s really moving is that of Susan, the escaped slave we meet at the beginning of the book. Other than her struggle to reunite with her still enslaved mother, I get the sense that the only thing in this story worth worrying about is Una’s peace of mind, and as even the death of a beloved husband Ahab seems barely to rattle her for a moment from her even keel, I was confident that Una’s peace of mind was never really in question. Near the end of the book Naslund provides a “twist” ending that I won’t give away except to say that no one really cares how much of a twist you put into a limp noodle.
Poetry and Tales by Edgar Allen Poe
27 December 2006
The book I’m reading now is Poetry and Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, published by the Library of America, and annotated by Patrick F Quinn. In dimension and color it resembles a brick— the best little detail is the burgundy ribbon attached to the spine and to be used as a bookmark. It gives the reader a feeling of participating in some ancient ritual of scholarship, a feeling of which Poe himself must have been enamored, for not only does he evidence it in his wide-ranging acquaintance with all manner of thought and study (languages ancient and modern, maritime lore, interior design, middle eastern geography, &c, &c) but he also frequently conjures up such erudition for literary effect. He at once created and embodied the image of a man yearning constantly for a different world, alternating between throwing himself into literature for escape, and bouts of being acutely attuned to the actual details of his senses, aware of every subtle gradation and dissonance of emotional effect, and, while not quite loathing the mortal world, wishing it could simply be rearranged to conform with his own vision of what beauty is.
I note this especially in the “sketch” called The Philosophy of Furniture. It’s a strange little piece where Poe first lists his complaints against the contemporary state of interior design in America, and then draws up his own plan for the unique apartment, one devoid of floral patterns and rich in tones of deep red and gold. As someone who doesn’t think much about the details of interior design, I couldn’t help but be carried along by Poe’s own sense of deep purpose here. This brief, focused essay came almost four-hundred pages into the collection of poems and short stories and—far from seeming out of place among the various fantastical exegeses and romps—it seemed to be the purest representation of what it is Poe was doing in all his works: he was arranging, composing, taking the decidedly finite confines of a short story and trying to fill it in just such a way to produce some sort of extreme effect, often the effect of the infinite.
At its worst, this yearning for the infinite can be seen in some of Poe’s dialogues, such as The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion or The Colloquy of Monos and Una. Both of these are conversations held in the afterlife between souls of the dead. While Eiros has at its heart an interesting apocalyptic vision, Monos devolves into a tedious mysticism as a deceased aesthete describes in excruciating detail the alterations of the senses during the process of death.
At its best, the infinite is externalized, as in the story A Descent into the Maelström, where a prematurely aged Norwegian mariner describes getting caught in a massive Arctic cataract: “The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.”
The book I’m reading now is Poetry and Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, published by the Library of America, and annotated by Patrick F Quinn. In dimension and color it resembles a brick— the best little detail is the burgundy ribbon attached to the spine and to be used as a bookmark. It gives the reader a feeling of participating in some ancient ritual of scholarship, a feeling of which Poe himself must have been enamored, for not only does he evidence it in his wide-ranging acquaintance with all manner of thought and study (languages ancient and modern, maritime lore, interior design, middle eastern geography, &c, &c) but he also frequently conjures up such erudition for literary effect. He at once created and embodied the image of a man yearning constantly for a different world, alternating between throwing himself into literature for escape, and bouts of being acutely attuned to the actual details of his senses, aware of every subtle gradation and dissonance of emotional effect, and, while not quite loathing the mortal world, wishing it could simply be rearranged to conform with his own vision of what beauty is.
I note this especially in the “sketch” called The Philosophy of Furniture. It’s a strange little piece where Poe first lists his complaints against the contemporary state of interior design in America, and then draws up his own plan for the unique apartment, one devoid of floral patterns and rich in tones of deep red and gold. As someone who doesn’t think much about the details of interior design, I couldn’t help but be carried along by Poe’s own sense of deep purpose here. This brief, focused essay came almost four-hundred pages into the collection of poems and short stories and—far from seeming out of place among the various fantastical exegeses and romps—it seemed to be the purest representation of what it is Poe was doing in all his works: he was arranging, composing, taking the decidedly finite confines of a short story and trying to fill it in just such a way to produce some sort of extreme effect, often the effect of the infinite.
At its worst, this yearning for the infinite can be seen in some of Poe’s dialogues, such as The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion or The Colloquy of Monos and Una. Both of these are conversations held in the afterlife between souls of the dead. While Eiros has at its heart an interesting apocalyptic vision, Monos devolves into a tedious mysticism as a deceased aesthete describes in excruciating detail the alterations of the senses during the process of death.
At its best, the infinite is externalized, as in the story A Descent into the Maelström, where a prematurely aged Norwegian mariner describes getting caught in a massive Arctic cataract: “The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.”
たのしく心あたたまる子どもの文学：一年生
by various authors
22 December 2006
This is a book of poems and short stories for Japanese children in the first year of elementary school. I found it up on the second story of the University of Alaska Anchorage–Alaska Pacific University Consortium Library, amongst about a hundred other Japanese titles for children. I came across this collection of books by chance while wandering the stacks. I recognized the opportunity immediately: my Japanese skills are rudimentary enough that a children’s book is about all I can make it through without blowing a fuse.
Of all the Japanese books I've read, 子どもの文学 is the oldest title. Other than a few color plates at the beginning, the book is all in black & white. The drawings are simple and the reproduction is poor quality. But the makers of the book coordinated the text with the images quite well—the major action or theme of each page is captured in the drawing, which is extremely helpful to a beginning reader who has to look up nearly every word in the dictionary.
This is not the first Japanese children’s book I read, but it’s the longest so far at 171 pages, and I had to work away at it for about three months, picking it up and putting it down in accordance with all the other things going on in my life. At first, reading the book seemed a chore. Without the colorful pictures and spacious margins the other titles offered, part of the fun and the reward seemed to be gone. But as I read on, I began to appreciate the way the complexity of the language escalated in subtle increments as the text continued, and I began to notice the recurrent theme of wonder that unites many of the stories. Early on, we eavesdrop on beachside conversation carried out by a trio of crabs as they speculate what lies beyond the sea. Later on, in the four-page -long ぼくの おんがくかい、a child narrator imagines what it would be like to have a classical music concert at sea. A set of simple drawings complement the childlike vision of a stage suspended over the waves by hot air balloons, while fish and sharks gather around to take in the sounds. In the story ちぉうちぉうのゆみ we sit in on the dream of a butterfly who imagines he can cross over the rainbow to the country of the moon, where he meets a rabbit who makes rice cakes that, when flung into the sky, become silver stars. On the first page of the story, the text is bracketed by drawings: in the lower right corner (the text is read from top to bottom and from right to left) is the butterfly perched on a leaf, gazing up toward the upper left, through the lines of text to the rainbow.
I started taking Japanese a couple of years ago at the college level. The textbooks we use focus mainly on vocabulary that would be useful for grown-up situations: how to describe the personnel of a corporate office, how to read the rental advertisements in a newspaper classified section. Reading 子どもの文学, I began to appreciate the power of children’s stories in helping us learn a language. In the grown-up world, we are taught to focus mainly on social conventions and practicalities: we have to know how to address people so as not to offend them; we have to know the proper names of services and products so as to be able to get through each day with a minimum of fuss. But such distinctions are a compromise to the mind that wants to really learn something new. Going back to the simple, graphic conventions of children’s fiction gives us a hint of what the mind most naturally fastens onto.
22 December 2006
This is a book of poems and short stories for Japanese children in the first year of elementary school. I found it up on the second story of the University of Alaska Anchorage–Alaska Pacific University Consortium Library, amongst about a hundred other Japanese titles for children. I came across this collection of books by chance while wandering the stacks. I recognized the opportunity immediately: my Japanese skills are rudimentary enough that a children’s book is about all I can make it through without blowing a fuse.
Of all the Japanese books I've read, 子どもの文学 is the oldest title. Other than a few color plates at the beginning, the book is all in black & white. The drawings are simple and the reproduction is poor quality. But the makers of the book coordinated the text with the images quite well—the major action or theme of each page is captured in the drawing, which is extremely helpful to a beginning reader who has to look up nearly every word in the dictionary.
This is not the first Japanese children’s book I read, but it’s the longest so far at 171 pages, and I had to work away at it for about three months, picking it up and putting it down in accordance with all the other things going on in my life. At first, reading the book seemed a chore. Without the colorful pictures and spacious margins the other titles offered, part of the fun and the reward seemed to be gone. But as I read on, I began to appreciate the way the complexity of the language escalated in subtle increments as the text continued, and I began to notice the recurrent theme of wonder that unites many of the stories. Early on, we eavesdrop on beachside conversation carried out by a trio of crabs as they speculate what lies beyond the sea. Later on, in the four-page -long ぼくの おんがくかい、a child narrator imagines what it would be like to have a classical music concert at sea. A set of simple drawings complement the childlike vision of a stage suspended over the waves by hot air balloons, while fish and sharks gather around to take in the sounds. In the story ちぉうちぉうのゆみ we sit in on the dream of a butterfly who imagines he can cross over the rainbow to the country of the moon, where he meets a rabbit who makes rice cakes that, when flung into the sky, become silver stars. On the first page of the story, the text is bracketed by drawings: in the lower right corner (the text is read from top to bottom and from right to left) is the butterfly perched on a leaf, gazing up toward the upper left, through the lines of text to the rainbow.
I started taking Japanese a couple of years ago at the college level. The textbooks we use focus mainly on vocabulary that would be useful for grown-up situations: how to describe the personnel of a corporate office, how to read the rental advertisements in a newspaper classified section. Reading 子どもの文学, I began to appreciate the power of children’s stories in helping us learn a language. In the grown-up world, we are taught to focus mainly on social conventions and practicalities: we have to know how to address people so as not to offend them; we have to know the proper names of services and products so as to be able to get through each day with a minimum of fuss. But such distinctions are a compromise to the mind that wants to really learn something new. Going back to the simple, graphic conventions of children’s fiction gives us a hint of what the mind most naturally fastens onto.
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