Writer and editor, blogger on books and ideas. Former university lecturer and professor.
Here is the final instalment of the first complete English translation of Saneatsu Mushanokoji’s Good Natured Man (1911), aka Good Natured Person, acknowledged prototype of the Japanese autobiographical genre of shishosetsu or I-novel. Recall that the narrative-proper concluded eight instalments ago: the internalized account of the narrator’s obsessive, […]
Five mysterious, anonymous figures discuss the passing of our protagonist, the onion skins of imagined identity ritualistically peeled away. An ironic tone stems, on the one hand, from the premise of living entities speaking of what truly may not be known to them, perhaps in a sense the […]
Mushanokoji’s brief digression into the contingency of existence is quite didactic. There is perhaps some Buddhist resonance in his ponderings on existential contingency, impermanence, and suffering. His recourse is, however, not towards the negation of self, nor to Buddha, but rather to a form of “hyper-subjectivisim” (Religions | […]
Superb dramaticule far ahead of its time, ‘Long Live the Ignorant!’ is redolent of Sigmund Freud. Jibun’s imagined “I”-character sits writing within the space of his own unconscious. Garbed in black, two mysterious figures observe the content of his script: an enticing representation of Freud’s ‘dreamwork‘. A harsh […]
The true and innate attraction between Ichiro and Shizu is interrupted. Yet at the same time, Ichiro and the woman he married do share a form of happiness—if merely a “conscious” happiness, with a lack and a longing at the centre of it. The anti-naturalistic narrative recedes from objectivity, […]
Key to unlocking the piece is again the notion of individuals entangled at an unconscious level, with the result that their feelings irrationally affect each other at a distance, quantum-style (if decades in advance of the actual science). The characters are unaware of the deep nature of their […]
Not unlike a Brechtian ‘alienation‘ or ‘estrangement effect’, Mushanokoji’s ‘supplementary record’ creates a distance from the naturalism of the original story. These addenda are intended to be read as though written by Jibun, the character in the story, not the author as such. Thus they are located at […]
Quantum entanglement, seriously? It may seem a leap to read this little piece as anticipating anything like, say, the profoundly amusing caricatures of Italo Cavino’s Cosmicomics of 1965. I will indulge the whim, however, aiming to underline the originality of Mushanokoji’s characterizations, for we of the 21st century […]
Herein ends the explicit narrative of the incorrigible Jibun’s hunger for a woman vis-à-vis the schoolgirl Tsuru. However, the book continues with several addenda, what Mushanokoji refers to as a ‘supplementary record, to be seen as something written by the protagonist of The Good Natured Man’. The supplementary […]
Cranes and turtles have a special relationship in Japanese folklore, despite being such different creatures. I became aware of this early during my fifteen-year stay in Japan, when I lived across the road from the main entrance of Atsuta Jingu, one of the three most important Shinto shrines. […]
Furin Chime 