Ambitions, Term Papers, Perfectionism

I am ambitious, too ambitious, when it comes to school work. This can have disastrous consequences at times; I always figure out too late that I've bitten off more than I can chew. Someone else needs to use the English version of Nanshoku Ookagami? No problem, right? I can plow through seventeenth-century Japanese instead. There are at least two pretty good books on the topic I'm supposed to be researching, views of sexuality in premodern Japan, and I have to decide that I'm interested in Buddhist theology as it relates to the topic, rather than in kabuki or samurai. And there are no books on this at all. Except, maybe, if I look in the Japanese section of the library... it's so tempting to keep pursuing this line of inquiry, half just to make myself look smart, and half because I've written seven hundred words and I can't rewrite my whole introduction.

This weekend I'm going to translate relevant bits of Nanshoku Ookagami for myself, and see just how much useful stuff I can get out of it, and I've recalled the one book I can find on Buddhism and sexuality. I could have done something easy. But I'm putting myself through this anyway...

Why are books on Japanese views of sexuality so horrible? Is it just me, or is Pink Samurai a terrible book? It just seems so unthinkingly amazed at how foreign and exotic and weird Japanese people are. I can't comment on the quality of the research, because I was flipping through it looking for one specific thing, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.