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laceblade about Soseki, and Japanese literature, this is the story of my Japanese Literature Ultimate Death Battle.
It's August, 2002. I'm towards the end of a one-year scholarship at Nagasaki University. I figured that it would be a lot easier to finish up my degree in 3 years at McGill than to try to get transfer credit for my Nagasaki U classes, so I wasn't worried about completing requirements for a major; I filled my schedule up with the required Japanese language classes, my advisor's Classical Japanese classes, some linguistics, some fluff that didn't require much linguistic competence (music, pottery), and a class in modern Japanese literature.
The classes in Classical Japanese were too hard for me, but my advisor more or less expected me just to learn to read the handwriting and sort of follow along with the story as best I could. But my professor in Modern Japanese Lit expected me to be roughly on par with the other (native speaker) students. We read The Dancing Girl by Mori Ogai, which was way above my head because of the prewar kana and kanji usage. We read Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, which was easier but still pretty rough. We read a Murakami Haruki short story that was later turned into Norwegian Wood.
So basically I was reading a lot about awful people and suicide, and it was very hard, all the time, on top of the expected language stress and homesickness and isolation.
It came time for my Japanese Literature final exam. There were three essay questions, and I answered two of them without huge problems, but the third was "Answer the question that was written on the blackboard in our last class."
To this day I do not know why I did not copy down the question on the blackboard. Did I skip that class? Did I write it down in the wrong notebook? Did I not notice it there? Anyway -- next week my advisor called me into a meeting to tell me that I was going to fail that class, but my professor was going to let me write an essay for partial credit. "You read Norwegian Wood, right? So just write a two-page essay on that tonight, and turn it in, and you can pass the class."
A careful reader will note that since I was not counting on getting any credit with McGill for any of the classes I was taking, failing a class was going to affect me in no way whatsoever. I did not think about this. It was TEN YEARS before I thought about that. (I mean, it would have been socially unacceptable to tell my advisor, "What the hell do I care if I fail that class?" or to not write that essay, so it would not have made that much difference, BUT STILL.) I was, back then, even more terrified of failure than I am now. It wasn't about consequences; it wasn't about the approval of others; it was just an unshakeable conviction that failing, at anything, was the worst thing imaginable.
There was one minor other point.
I had not read Norwegian Wood.
I had read, in high school, about half of Norwegian Wood in the original Japanese. This took me several months of very slow reading with a dictionary. I was liking it well enough, except that I got really worried that Naoko was going to kill herself, and that got all tangled up with being worried about the mental health of a friend of mine, and I got to the point where I just couldn't bear to go on.
I could not write an essay on a book I had only half read; I could not finish the book in time to write an essay; I could not tell the truth to my advisor; so I just said that I'd do it, and I'd try hard and do my best, and then I took the trolley to Kinokuniya and bought the English translation of Norwegian Wood, and I finished it while mostly sobbing into my donburi, and I went back to my dorm. I sat down to write my essay. Kids were setting off firecrackers in the streets, and there was music coming from somewhere, and I was crying on my grid paper.
And I wrote an essay on how Murakami correctly makes the case that everything is terrible and pointless.
And I turned it in and I guess it was marginally acceptable.
I still can't contemplate Soseki, or Mori Ogai, without thinking about that semester which was so full of books that made me sad and angry and made me feel like a Bad Student who was spending all her time reading yaoi novels and couldn't hack Real Literature.
A few years ago I was massively weeding my book collection and came upon my terribly beat-up Japanese copy of Norwegian Wood, and I thought I should throw it out -- I didn't actually like the book that much, and it was in bad shape. And I couldn't do it. It felt like a relic from a hard-fought battle.
laceblade about Soseki, and Japanese literature, this is the story of my Japanese Literature Ultimate Death Battle.It's August, 2002. I'm towards the end of a one-year scholarship at Nagasaki University. I figured that it would be a lot easier to finish up my degree in 3 years at McGill than to try to get transfer credit for my Nagasaki U classes, so I wasn't worried about completing requirements for a major; I filled my schedule up with the required Japanese language classes, my advisor's Classical Japanese classes, some linguistics, some fluff that didn't require much linguistic competence (music, pottery), and a class in modern Japanese literature.
The classes in Classical Japanese were too hard for me, but my advisor more or less expected me just to learn to read the handwriting and sort of follow along with the story as best I could. But my professor in Modern Japanese Lit expected me to be roughly on par with the other (native speaker) students. We read The Dancing Girl by Mori Ogai, which was way above my head because of the prewar kana and kanji usage. We read Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, which was easier but still pretty rough. We read a Murakami Haruki short story that was later turned into Norwegian Wood.
So basically I was reading a lot about awful people and suicide, and it was very hard, all the time, on top of the expected language stress and homesickness and isolation.
It came time for my Japanese Literature final exam. There were three essay questions, and I answered two of them without huge problems, but the third was "Answer the question that was written on the blackboard in our last class."
To this day I do not know why I did not copy down the question on the blackboard. Did I skip that class? Did I write it down in the wrong notebook? Did I not notice it there? Anyway -- next week my advisor called me into a meeting to tell me that I was going to fail that class, but my professor was going to let me write an essay for partial credit. "You read Norwegian Wood, right? So just write a two-page essay on that tonight, and turn it in, and you can pass the class."
A careful reader will note that since I was not counting on getting any credit with McGill for any of the classes I was taking, failing a class was going to affect me in no way whatsoever. I did not think about this. It was TEN YEARS before I thought about that. (I mean, it would have been socially unacceptable to tell my advisor, "What the hell do I care if I fail that class?" or to not write that essay, so it would not have made that much difference, BUT STILL.) I was, back then, even more terrified of failure than I am now. It wasn't about consequences; it wasn't about the approval of others; it was just an unshakeable conviction that failing, at anything, was the worst thing imaginable.
There was one minor other point.
I had not read Norwegian Wood.
I had read, in high school, about half of Norwegian Wood in the original Japanese. This took me several months of very slow reading with a dictionary. I was liking it well enough, except that I got really worried that Naoko was going to kill herself, and that got all tangled up with being worried about the mental health of a friend of mine, and I got to the point where I just couldn't bear to go on.
I could not write an essay on a book I had only half read; I could not finish the book in time to write an essay; I could not tell the truth to my advisor; so I just said that I'd do it, and I'd try hard and do my best, and then I took the trolley to Kinokuniya and bought the English translation of Norwegian Wood, and I finished it while mostly sobbing into my donburi, and I went back to my dorm. I sat down to write my essay. Kids were setting off firecrackers in the streets, and there was music coming from somewhere, and I was crying on my grid paper.
And I wrote an essay on how Murakami correctly makes the case that everything is terrible and pointless.
And I turned it in and I guess it was marginally acceptable.
I still can't contemplate Soseki, or Mori Ogai, without thinking about that semester which was so full of books that made me sad and angry and made me feel like a Bad Student who was spending all her time reading yaoi novels and couldn't hack Real Literature.
A few years ago I was massively weeding my book collection and came upon my terribly beat-up Japanese copy of Norwegian Wood, and I thought I should throw it out -- I didn't actually like the book that much, and it was in bad shape. And I couldn't do it. It felt like a relic from a hard-fought battle.