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12/8/06 19:05One of the recent library books is Donald Keene's "Dawn to the West," 1100 or so pages on the history of Japanese literature from 1868 forward, giving minute attention to more authors than I would have thought possible. (The first volume is just the writers of prose fiction; Keene has another volume, just a little smaller, for the poets and other writers).
It's interesting first of all because it gives some badly needed context to a sea of "This is soooo hard why are they making me read this?"--history and biography and literary movements and so on.
The second reason it's interesting is that it seems that whenever I've tried to read something pre-1970-ish, I've found it much harder than expected, which can be discouraging. Now I find out that nearly invariably, the things I was trying to read actually were really hard--and it was mostly coincidental; Kokoro and Mai-Hime were the only things they made me read.
For example, Ogai was very resistant to modernizing his orthography or prose style, and Mai-Hime, as one of his earlier stories, is very conspicuously old-fashioned in both. I thought I'd take another crack at Ogai, but the novel I picked (as Keene says) "opens with a rather overpowering sentence":
"Hosokawa Tadatoshi, Junior Lower Fourth Rank, Minor Captain of the Left Palace Guards and Governor of Etchu, in the spring of the eighteenth year of Kan'ei, the Year of the Serpent, putting behind him his domain, the province of Higo, where the cherry blooms earlier than elsewhere, and surrounded before and behind by a splendid procession worthy of a daimyo whose stipend was 540,000 koku, was about to set out for duties in Edo, following in the footsteps of the spring from south to north, when he was unexpectedly overtaken by illness; the remedies of his personal physician had no effect, and his sickness grew only the worse with each passing day, so a messenger was dispatched to Edo to report the delay in his departure."
Or there's Mishima, who actually wrote short stories about being beat up in grade school because he used too many big words. They apparently did not cure him of using too many big words.
I think that year might've been easier if someone had been around to tell me, "Yes, you're not imagining it, this actually is difficult."
It's interesting first of all because it gives some badly needed context to a sea of "This is soooo hard why are they making me read this?"--history and biography and literary movements and so on.
The second reason it's interesting is that it seems that whenever I've tried to read something pre-1970-ish, I've found it much harder than expected, which can be discouraging. Now I find out that nearly invariably, the things I was trying to read actually were really hard--and it was mostly coincidental; Kokoro and Mai-Hime were the only things they made me read.
For example, Ogai was very resistant to modernizing his orthography or prose style, and Mai-Hime, as one of his earlier stories, is very conspicuously old-fashioned in both. I thought I'd take another crack at Ogai, but the novel I picked (as Keene says) "opens with a rather overpowering sentence":
"Hosokawa Tadatoshi, Junior Lower Fourth Rank, Minor Captain of the Left Palace Guards and Governor of Etchu, in the spring of the eighteenth year of Kan'ei, the Year of the Serpent, putting behind him his domain, the province of Higo, where the cherry blooms earlier than elsewhere, and surrounded before and behind by a splendid procession worthy of a daimyo whose stipend was 540,000 koku, was about to set out for duties in Edo, following in the footsteps of the spring from south to north, when he was unexpectedly overtaken by illness; the remedies of his personal physician had no effect, and his sickness grew only the worse with each passing day, so a messenger was dispatched to Edo to report the delay in his departure."
Or there's Mishima, who actually wrote short stories about being beat up in grade school because he used too many big words. They apparently did not cure him of using too many big words.
I think that year might've been easier if someone had been around to tell me, "Yes, you're not imagining it, this actually is difficult."