天皇誕生日 Tennō Tanjōbi. The birthday of the reigning emperor has been a national holiday since 1868. Emperor Naruhito was born on this day in 1960. You know you’re getting up there when Japanese Emperors become younger than you are. Let’s light the candles despite this sobering thought by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.
Some Japanese Portraits - Donald Keene
Born in 1922, Keene was the perfect age to study Japanese and become an intelligence officer in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Postwar he received master’s degrees from Columbia and Cambridge and a doctorate from Columbia. He devoted his long career to studying and teaching Japanese literature.
This book is a collection of essays about Japanese poetry, plays, and fiction from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Originally written in Japanese for a weekly magazine, the articles on unjustly forgotten writers are engrossing, articulate and a delight to read. The only problem I had is that Keene assumes his readers are Japanese and thus know as a matter of course things like the modern name of Bingo Province (備後国 Bingo no kuni).
What's interesting is that Keene delivers incredible factoids. For instance, he says the first contemporary European novel translated into Japanese in 1879 was Bulwer-Lytton's novel Ernest Maltravers about which Thackeray fumed, “We cannot conceive an [author] to have failed more completely. He wishes to paint an amiable man and he succeeds in drawing a scoundrel. He says he will give us the likeness of a genius and it is only the picture of a humbug.”
It's so strange that this inept novel inspired the very first Japanese political novel in which a geisha named “Rights” takes a lover named “Popular Government in Japan” and her other boyfriend is named “Inspiring Instances of Statesmanship.” Probably sounds better with the original Chinese characters.
In conclusion, an excellent book for readers into the
more obscure byways of Japanese literature.
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