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 […]
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. […]
A small group of foreign words in katakana (phonetic script) presented an initially worrying, but ultimately amusing and enlightening, knot to untie. Katakana is the means by which the Japanese writing system represents foreign words. It was first used to enable the pronunciation of imported Chinese texts (since […]
Reflecting on his yearning for the beautiful young Tsuru—and reflecting on his reflections—Jibun invokes a classic Japanese love suicide, “a tragic tale of unrestrained desire” (Brownstein). The scandalous affair of Onatsu and Seijuro occurred in the mid-seventeenth century and inspired poetry, novels, plays for bunraku puppet theatre, and […]
A Japanese character (kanji) compound, ‘mede’ (目出: “eye” + “go out”) is the basis for the expression, ‘good natured’ in Mushanokoji’s translated title Omedetaki-hito. The compound appears in the common congratulatory phrase, ‘omedetou gozaimasu’, as in, for example, ‘tanjoubi omedetou gozaimasu’ (Many happy returns of the day!) However, […]
Furin Chime 