Sunday, November 30, 2014
Study Guide: Hayashi Fumiko “Late Chrysanthemum” (Bangiku; 1948)
Morrison
Study Guide:
Hayashi Fumiko “Late Chrysanthemum” (Bangiku; 1948)[1]
*To read the story in the original, click
here.
*To purchase Lane Dunlop’s 1986 translation, click
here.
Hayashi Fumiko 林芙美子 (1903-1951): Novelist whose realistic
stories deal with urban working-class life. Hayashi lived an unsettled life
until 1916, when she went to Onomichi, where she stayed until graduation from
high school in 1922. In her lonely childhood she grew to love literature, and
when she went out to work she started writing poetry and children’s stories in
her spare time. Hayashi’s own experiences of hunger and humiliation appear in
her first work, Hōrōki (1930; “Diary of a Vagabond,” published in
English translation in Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese
Women’s Literature), and Seihin no sho (1931; “A Life of Poverty”).
Her stories of degradation and instability, depicting women who remained
undaunted, commanded a strong following. Often near sentimentality, they are
saved by a realistic and direct style. She reached the peak of her popularity
after World War II, when such stories as Daun taun (1948; “Downtown,”
published in English translation in Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology)
and Ukigumo (1949; Floating Cloud) mirrored the harsh postwar
scene. Hayashi died suddenly of heart strain from overwork. (Encyclopædia
Britannica) (Click here for Aozora
Bunko texts.)
Study Questions
1.
What type of narrator is used in this story? Where is the focalization point?
Does this focalization point move?
2.
Describe the style of narration. Is there more “showing” (representation) or “telling”
(presentation)?
3.
Describe the willful, proud, beautiful but aging, retired geisha Aizawa Kin.
Discuss her appearance, personality, sexual history, work history,
background/upbringing, drug use, view of men/women, financial circumstances,
worldview, sense of values, line of work, taste in clothes, hopes/fears, etc.
How has she changed over the years (if at all)? Is she a symbol for something?
4.
Describe Kin’s much younger lover Tabé. Discuss his background, past and present
circumstances, war experience, etc. What is his motivation for visiting Kin?
5.
Note the literary/cultural references that appear in the work (e.g. Ise monogatari, Ihara Saikaku, etc.). What
is their function/effect?
6.
When/where does the story take place? Discuss the importance of this historical
context.
7.
Describe Kin’s frame of mind in the opening scene. How does she prepare for Tabé’s
visit? What does she expect from the encounter?
8. Describe the reunion between Kin
and Tabé. How does the encounter fail to meet Kin’s expectations? What “fortress”
stands between them?
9.
Describe the circumstances of Kin and Tabé’s relationship four years ago. How
were things different then?
10.
Discuss the undercurrent of violence in the story. Is there foreshadowing of
the potential violence on page 102?
11.
Discuss the role of the deaf maid Kinu. How does she serve as a contrast to
Kinu? What qualities of Tabé does her presence bring out?
12.
How do memories of Kin’s past lovers (Itaya, Yamazaki, etc.) appear in the
story? How do these memories contrast with the reality of Tabé?
13.
Discuss the following passage in terms of the social context of postwar period:
“You’re
saying I didn’t turn out well, then?” “Yes, I am.” “That’s thanks to you, and
the long war.” “Ah, that’s an excuse. Things like that are not the reason.
You’ve become completely vulgar...” “So what if I'm vulgar? That's how people
are.”
14. Discuss the significance of Kin’s
final act (i.e. the burning of her picture of young Tabé).
15. This work has been described
by prominent critic Nakamura Mitsuo as one of the ten best “naturalist” (shizenshugi) pieces of modern Japanese
literature.[2]
What “naturalist” qualities do you see in the text?
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Study Guide: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō “In Praise of Shadows” (In’ei raisan; 1933)
Morrison
Study Guide: Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō “In Praise of Shadows” (In’ei raisan; 1933)[1]
Tanizaki
Junichirō 谷崎潤一郎 (1886-1965): Novelist,
essayist. A prolific writer whose popularity extended through the reigns of
three emperors, Tanizaki is perhaps best known for Sasameyuki (1943-48, tr. The Makioka Sisters, 1957). A detailed
account of an Osaka family that embraces a tradition-bound way of life, it was
the first major Japanese work of the post-World War II period. Tanizaki’s other
novels include a modern version of The
Tale of Genji; Some Prefer Nettles
(1928, tr. 1955); Quicksand (1928-30,
tr. 1994); The Key (1956, tr. 1961),
and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961, tr.
1965). A witness to the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, which destroyed half the
city, he moved to the Kansai region (the greater Kyoto-Osaka area), where a
more traditional lifestyle still prevailed. The new environment influenced his
outlook, and many of his works carry an implied condemnation of excessive
interest in Western things. Tanizaki often writes of women, taking as his
themes obsessive love, the destructive forces of sexuality, and the dual nature
of woman as goddess and demon. His other work includes the selected short
stories of Seven Japanese Tales (tr.
1963) and The Gourmet Club (tr. 2001)
and the novellas The Reed Cutter
(1932, tr. 1994) and Captain Shigemoto’s
Mother (1949-50, tr. 1994). (Source: The Columbia Encyclopedia).
Warning:
Do not read this essay as a tract on Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki is a
novelist. Novelists perform. They make up stuff. They entertain. They play roles.
Here he is playing with the public persona of an old grumpy man who dislikes
everything about modern civilization and complains a lot, yet does nothing
about it, and constantly fails to live up to own standards. The key to the
essay is in the last paragraph.
Study Questions
1.
The essay consists of sixteen sections. Discuss this structure. How does it
move from one subject to the next? What is the overarching theme?
2.
Who is the narrator? Why does he refer to himself as an “old man” (Tanizaki
himself was only in his mid-40s when he wrote this)? Is the narrator the
author? How does he resemble the old man in Tanizaki’s novel Tade kuu mushi (Some Prefer Nettles;
1929)?
3.
Describe the tone of the essay. Where is the narrator joking/being ironic?
Where is he serious? How can you tell?
4.
Among the topics Tanizaki discusses are: traditional architecture, electric
lights, fans, candles, screen doors (shōji),
electric stoves, gas stoves, fireplaces (danro),
bathrooms, tile roofs, wood, radios, films, oil paintings, traditional lacquer
(urushi), ceramics, roofs in
traditional Japanese architecture, uses/value of gold, Japanese food, yōkan confectionary, walls, study bays, alcoves
(toko no ma), hanging scrolls (kakejiku), flower arrangement (ikebana), traditional Japanese rooms, the
importance of silence/quietude/pauses, temple architecture, priest’s robes, Noh
costumes, the skin of Noh performers, Kabuki, puppet theater (bunraku), teeth blackening (o-haguro), etc. Discuss each of these
and their relation to the essay’s main theme (the importance of shadows). How
do they each illustrate “the magic of shadows”?
5.
Discuss the narrator’s remarks on the toilets in the East. Is he being ironic?
What is he parodying? Explain.
6. What value
does the narrator place on dirt, grime, stains, impurity, uncleanliness, oldness,
rusticity, patina, etc.? What does he mean by “elegance is filthy”? Can these
remarks be read as a challenge to the discourses of “Japanese purity” that were
prevalent at the time? Is his insistence on the importance/beauty of “grime”
“dirt” “impurity” a challenge to cultural nationalists of day?
7. Make a list
of all binaries that appear in the work (e.g. East/West, country/city, Kyoto/Tokyo,
night/day, light/shadows, vulgar/elegant, etc.). Are these binaries problematized/collapsed
at any point? Explain.
8.
Discuss the narrator’s description of the Japanese “national character” (kokuminsei)? What examples does he give
to illustrate this character? What is a “national character”? Is there such a
thing? What is Japan’s/your “national character”?
9. Explain the
narrator’s comments about the possibility of an alternative modernity, of a science/technology/arts
“more suited to our national character.” What would this alternative look like?
Is an alternative modernity possible?
10.
According to the narrator, how did Japan’s process of modernization differ from
that of the West?
11. Can this
essay be read as a critique of the Meiji-era ethos of “civilization and
enlightenment” (bunmei kaika)? What other
anti-bunmei kaika works have we read?
Explain.
12.
How does this essay relate to the “return to Japan” (Nihon kaiki) cultural movement of the 1930s? Does it challenge/subvert
this dominant discourse in any way? Explain.
13.
How is China (and to a lesser extent India) described in this essay? How does the
narrator view the traditional paper, jade, food, and crystals of China? Is the
China he describes the China of 1933, or the China of the ancient past?
14.
Explain the phrase “elegance is frigid.” How do these remarks about elegance compare
with other “treatises on elegance” (fūryūron)
written around the same time?
15.
Explain the narrator’s view of the relationship between beauty and everyday
life/material conditions/fūdo. Discuss the significance
of the line: “The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from
the realities of life” (18).[2]
16.
Discuss the narrator’s description of Japanese women/female beauty. What are
the defining features of the “typical woman of old” (29)? How does he recall
his mother?
17.
The narrator makes numerous generalizations. For example: “Such is our way of
thinking—we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows,
the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates” (30). Are
such generalizations verifiable, consistent with evidence? Is it true that the West
has placed less of a value on shadows (30-31)? Doesn’t Western art abound in shadows?
(Think: Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, gothic writers, fin de siècle writers, Romantic/Symbolist
poets, chiaroscuro in Renaissance painting; extreme chiaroscuro of Caravaggio,
El Greco, Rembrandt; Shakespeare, etc.) Is there any validity to the narrator’s
claim that East=shadows, West=light? That “We Orientals find beauty not only in
the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and darkness
which that thing provides.” (31)
18. Discuss the
narrator’s concept of races/skin colors and their relation to “cloudiness” and “grime”
(31-32).What contemporary racial discourses are evoked in essay? Explain.
19.
Discuss the connection between the narrator’s description of women as white disembodied
ethereal faces wrapped in darkness, and the female characters in Tanizaki’s
fiction. Is it true that women exhale/exude darkness from their orifices/bodies?
The
darkness wrapped her round tenfold, twentyfold, it filled the collar, the
sleeves of her kimono, the folds of her skirt, wherever a hollow invited.
Further yet: might it not have been the reverse, might not the darkness have
emerged from her mouth and those black teeth, from the black of her hair, like
the thread from the great earth spider?
20.
The narrator decries Japan as the world’s second greatest waster—second only to
America—of energy/electricity (35-38). How might we read these remarks today in
the wake of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake/tsunami/nuclear crisis? What might
Tanizaki’s answer to the current energy crisis be? What does the narrator
recommend for keeping cool in the summer?
21.
In the final section, the narrator compares himself to the old griping women of
England who complain about the modern age. How is he similar?
22. On page 9, the
narrator states that behind shadows is a mere void, i.e. that shadows are the
reality/more real that the object that casts them. In what other works of this
period have we seen this idea? (Think: Tanizaki’s “Mr. Bluemound,” Kajii
Motojirō’s “Ascension of K,” Hagiwara’s “Town of Cats,” etc.) Explain.
23. The last
paragraph is the key to the entire essay. After reading this paragraph, what do
you think the essay’s actual/implicit subject is? What are “shadows” a metaphor
for?
I am
aware of and most grateful for the benefits of the age. No matter what
complaints we may have, Japan has chosen to follow the West, and there is
nothing for her to do but move bravely ahead and leave us old ones behind. But
we must be resigned to the fact that as long as our skin is the color it is the
loss we have suffered cannot be remedied. I have written all this because I
have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the
arts, where something could be saved. I would call back at least for literature
this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would
have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the
things that came forward to clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration.
I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at
least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is
like without them.” (42).
Further Reading
1. Margherita
Long. This Perversion Called Love:
Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud.
[1] Originally
published in December 1933 and Jaunary 1934 issues of Keizai ōrai . Full translation by Edward G. Seidensticker and Thomas J.
Harper was published in 1977.
[2] Watsuji Tetsurō
wrote Fūdo ningenteki kōsatsu from 1928-1935; its
main theme: climate, in a broad sense, determines national character. Traces of
work can be seen here, perhaps in parodized form.
Monday, November 10, 2014
Die Tanzerin (1988)-- A Film Adaptation of Mori Ōgai’s “The Dancing Girl” (Maihime; 1890)
| Originaltitel: | Maihime - The Dancer |
|---|---|
| Darsteller: | Brigitte Grothum, Hiromi Goh und Lisa Wolf |
| Kinostart: | kA |
| Länge: | 121 Minuten |
| Genre: | Drama und Literaturverfilmung-Film |
| Jugendfreigabe: | kA |
| Regisseur: | Masahiro Shinoda |
| Drehbuch: | Masahiro Shinoda, Hans Borgelt und Tsotomu Tamura |
| Herstellungsland: | Deutschland und Japan |
| Drehjahr: | 1988 |
| Website: | kA |
Animated Film of Mori Ōgai’s “The Dancing Girl” 森鴎外「舞姫」
青春アニメ全集「舞姫」 ： 1986年に日本テレビ系列で放送
脚本：吉田憲二
演出：石黒昇、
作画監督：しまだひであき（アートランド）
エリス：山本百合子
太田豊太郎：池田秀一
（不正確な）日本語字幕つき
脚本：吉田憲二
演出：石黒昇、
作画監督：しまだひであき（アートランド）
エリス：山本百合子
太田豊太郎：池田秀一
（不正確な）日本語字幕つき
Study Guide for Mori Ōgai’s “The Dancing Girl” (Maihime; 1890)
Morrison
Study Guide for
Mori Ōgai’s “The Dancing Girl” (Maihime; 1890)[1]
*To purchase
Richard Bowring’s English translation, click here.
*To read the
original, click here.
Mori Ōgai (1862-1922): Born in Shimane-ken to family of physicians to daimyō; received elite
education in neo-Confucian classics. In 1872, he moved in with Nishi Amane, began
studying German. Graduates from Tokyo Imperial University medical school,
becomes a doctor at 19; reads late-Edo gesaku fiction; sent by army to study in
Germany from 1884-1888; encounters European literature; publishes Shigarami sōshi, 1889–1894 and
his own book of poetry (Omokage, 1889) in anti-realist, German Romantic
vein (Ōgai vs. Tsubouchi); institutes modern literary criticism in Japan based
on the aesthetic theories of Karl von Hartmann. In 1890, publishes “Maihime.” His own exile to Kyushu; appointed surgeon general in
1907; edits Mezamashi gusa,
1892–1909 while serving in army as surgeon; translates works of Goethe,
Schiller, Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, and Hauptmann. From 1912–1916:
historical stories (rekishi monogatari; e.g. “Sanshō dayu,” “Takasebune”). From 1916-death: shiden (literary biographies; e.g. “Shibue
Chūsai”). His literary style is often characterized as Apollonian,
rational, stoic, manly, understated.
1. Discuss the
narrative structure. Where (temporally/spatially) is the “narrating I”?
Why/what is he writing? Is he an example of a “self-conscious narrator”?
2. Describe the
narrator (i.e. his position, background, education, motivations/desires,
priorities, concerns/struggles, talents, interests, behavior, personality, etc.).
3. What examples
of foreshadowing can you find in the work? (Hint: unwritten notebooks; “hidden
remorse”; etc.).
4. Make a list
of all the cultural/historical references that appear.
5. How does Ōta
Toyotarō describe the city scene on his first day in Berlin? Why does he try to
keep himself from being moved by the various sights?
6. Describe the
“real self” that Ōta feels emerging inside of him. How is this “real self” different
from his “former assumed self”? Does this “true nature” prove to be an
illusion?
7. How is Ōta
regarded/treated by his Japanese peers?
8. Describe Ōta’s
view of/relations with women prior to his encounter with Elise.
9. Describe
Elise (i.e. her circumstances/background/predicament/behavior/etc.). In what
state is she when Ōta discovers her? How does she react to him? Why does the
narrator describe dancing as a “disreputable trade”?
10. Do you
perceive any hints of anti-Japanese/anti-Asian racism in the work? Explain.
11. At one point
the narrator asks himself: “Did she [Elise] know the effect her eyes had on me,
or was it unintentional?” What is the answer to this question? In other words,
to what extent is Elise’s innocence/naivety feigned/strategic?
12. Why
is Ōta’s position terminated? What is the content of the two letters he
receives?
13. Describe the
evolving stages of Ōta and Elise’s relationship.
14. How does Ōta’s
friend Aizawa Kenkichi “help” him?
15. Describe Ōta
and Elise’s life when they are living together. How does Ōta change during this
period? What new interests/skills does he acquire?
16. How does Ōta’s
luck change beginning in the winter of 1888? What are the sources of his
anxiety during this period? What advice does he receive from Aizawa Kenkichi
after confiding in him? How does Ōta take this advice?
17. Describe Ōta’s
trip to Russia. Describe the nature of the letters he receives from Elise while
in Russia.
18. Discuss the
meaning/significance of the following sentence: “With Aizawa’s help she had not
wanted for daily necessities, it was true, but this same benefactor had had
spiritually killed her.” (「相沢の助にて日々の生計たつきには窮せざりしが、此恩人は彼を精神的に殺しゝなり。」)
19. Describe
Elise’s metamorphosis. What causes it? Is it believable under such
circumstances? What are the “ur-texts” for this scene? Who are Elise’s literary
models? What was the “something” she was looking for?
20. Discuss the
ethical problems/implications of the work. How grave was Ōta’s “crime”? Is Ōta’s
behavior/decision/course of action ethically defensible? Was there another more
ethical option? If so, what?
21. Discuss the
significance of the famous last sentence: “Friends like Aizawa Kenkichi are
rare indeed, and yet to this very day there remains a part of me that curses
him.” (「嗚呼、相沢謙吉が如き良友は世にまた得がたかるべし。されど我脳裡なうりに一点の彼を憎むこゝろ今日までも残れりけり。」)
Further
Discussion
1. What is the
main conflict of the story? Is this a moral story about the tension between giri and ninjō, as some critics have described it?
2. Why did Ōgai
use the pseudo-classical style (gikobun/gabun) rather than the modern colloquial
style (genbun itchi) to write this
story?
3. Why has the
work been read as an autobiography/roman à clef in Japan? What are the
advantages/disadvantages of reading the work as autobiography/roman
à clef?
4. Discuss the
theme/representation of interracial sex in the work. How is this story a
reversal of Loti/Belasco/Long/Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1887/1898/1900/1904) story?
5. Is the work a
Bildungsroman? Explain.
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Dissertation Submitted
This just in→My chief advisor has received my dissertation； I repeat： dissertation submission has been confirmed by my advisor。To celebrate the occasion I have made this video, a lousy-G.Gould-imitation-video (BWV 861 WTC1: Prelude 16 G minor)。
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)