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5/9/09 22:09![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyI cannot spend an afternoon at Kinokuniya without thinking, what a lot of things there are in the world! And I　want them, and they will not fit on my bookshelves.
At first I didn't know why they saw fit to publish a juvenile-adapted version of Mishima's Shiosai, but then I looked it up and realized it's The Sound of Waves in English, which was on our list of options for books to read in 10th grade World Lit. (I didn't read it, but my sister did.) I kind of want it, along with a lot of their classics-annotated-for-illiterates, but they're on the heavy and pricey side.
Nor do I know why there is now a novel adaptation of Hagio Moto's Toma no Shinzou. I can't think of why I was cranky about that, except that the original's perfectly fine -- maybe just because I'm very cranky about the Dave Eggers novelization of "Where the Wild Things Are," a spackle of modern psychological realism that gloops all over one of the very finest picture books in existence. (I still think that the movie could be good.)
Kadokawa has a new series called "Kimi ga mitsukeru monogatari," which are short-story anthologies targeted at teenagers--there's one for school stories, love stories, friendship stories, scary stories, etc. There is something friendly about them, even though the scary stories book (it was on display. It came home with me) opens with a story about serial wrist amputations. It's real literature at least in the sense that there are stories by Edogawa Rampo, Murakami Haruki, Miyabe Miyuki, Hoshi Shin'ichi, but so far I'm only having to look up a word or two per page.
Also home with me is "Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo: 5 Japanese Women," which was the cheapest and most readable of a number of books I wanted on gender roles post-Meiji. It has biographical essays on actress Matsui Sumako, Takamura Chieko (most famous as poet Takamura Kotaro's wife), poet Yanagiwara Byakuren, writer Uno Chiyo, and actress Takamine Hideko, all of whom were most active during the first half of the 20th century. This is fascinating so far--it seems like there are a lot of really terrible love affairs where there was enough terrible to go around on both sides but only the man's side of the story made it into the officially accepted truth. (And the author, Phyllis Birnbaum, writes about struggling not to see her subjects as 100% unfairly maligned.)
I think I've moved past being upset that Japanese is not one of my big priorities right now, and that it will move back there are time and money allows, or it won't and that's all right too. It seems like I can never stick with serious studying for long enough to make any real progress--not to slide back, maybe. I mean, I really wish I could read pre-war prose with any facility, but is that a genuine wish or is that just a braggy thing to be able to say I could? I'd still maybe someday like to do graduate studies in Japanese, but doing it just for personal edification would be different from doing it as a career move.
At first I didn't know why they saw fit to publish a juvenile-adapted version of Mishima's Shiosai, but then I looked it up and realized it's The Sound of Waves in English, which was on our list of options for books to read in 10th grade World Lit. (I didn't read it, but my sister did.) I kind of want it, along with a lot of their classics-annotated-for-illiterates, but they're on the heavy and pricey side.
Nor do I know why there is now a novel adaptation of Hagio Moto's Toma no Shinzou. I can't think of why I was cranky about that, except that the original's perfectly fine -- maybe just because I'm very cranky about the Dave Eggers novelization of "Where the Wild Things Are," a spackle of modern psychological realism that gloops all over one of the very finest picture books in existence. (I still think that the movie could be good.)
Kadokawa has a new series called "Kimi ga mitsukeru monogatari," which are short-story anthologies targeted at teenagers--there's one for school stories, love stories, friendship stories, scary stories, etc. There is something friendly about them, even though the scary stories book (it was on display. It came home with me) opens with a story about serial wrist amputations. It's real literature at least in the sense that there are stories by Edogawa Rampo, Murakami Haruki, Miyabe Miyuki, Hoshi Shin'ichi, but so far I'm only having to look up a word or two per page.
Also home with me is "Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo: 5 Japanese Women," which was the cheapest and most readable of a number of books I wanted on gender roles post-Meiji. It has biographical essays on actress Matsui Sumako, Takamura Chieko (most famous as poet Takamura Kotaro's wife), poet Yanagiwara Byakuren, writer Uno Chiyo, and actress Takamine Hideko, all of whom were most active during the first half of the 20th century. This is fascinating so far--it seems like there are a lot of really terrible love affairs where there was enough terrible to go around on both sides but only the man's side of the story made it into the officially accepted truth. (And the author, Phyllis Birnbaum, writes about struggling not to see her subjects as 100% unfairly maligned.)
I think I've moved past being upset that Japanese is not one of my big priorities right now, and that it will move back there are time and money allows, or it won't and that's all right too. It seems like I can never stick with serious studying for long enough to make any real progress--not to slide back, maybe. I mean, I really wish I could read pre-war prose with any facility, but is that a genuine wish or is that just a braggy thing to be able to say I could? I'd still maybe someday like to do graduate studies in Japanese, but doing it just for personal edification would be different from doing it as a career move.
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(no subject)
6/9/09 12:06 (UTC)