Modern and Contemporary Japanese Novels

"Jump With Me" (original art work by Stephanie Schoeller)

2007-05-10T08:02:00.000-06:00

Adrienne,

I figured you might want an explanation of my piece of art. Basically the entire piece is filled with bits that made a strong impression on me visually as I read the novel. Firstly is the color. The first chapter of the novel especially mentioned the color yellow a lot and the sand/dust that came in from the Chinese mainland. So, I created a yellow background. The smaller orange space and then the smaller red space are to delineate between the three chapters which I felt was very important because it was the perspective of three different people. The color gets “stronger” the farther into the story we get. The lip sofas in the first chapter were also a strong image for me as I read the novel. The three phrases written on the sofas were repeated concepts in the novel as well and I felt they were very important. In the orange part of the piece, there are 20 drops of water. The spring/pool in the second chapter was a significant location for important events and it was also a strong image. So, I added water drops. However, I also interpret them as tear drops. There are 20 because 4 out of those 20 have faces on them. The statement in the book (however false it may have been) that 1 in 5 people is targeted for a love suicide was another strong image. Thus, the 4 faces out of 20 on the water droplets. In the last red rectangle, there is just a jumping girl. Whether the last lines in the novel are literal or figurative, the image it creates in my mind is very strong. So I have it repeat at varying strengths in the other two sections of color; almost like a mirror. Enjoy! I hope it at least covers something of what you were probably hoping for from me.

-Stephanie Schoeller

To view a larger version of Stephanie's wonderful piece, please click on the image above.

A photo for us from Jim and my office hours this week

2007-05-06T22:24:00.000-06:00

Jim loved our pictures and sent me this picture. He was hoping I could fit it into our class photos, but I'm not that talented, alas.

Traci asked about my office hours this week. I will be around, but in and out a lot because of some dissertation defenses, etc. I think the safest time to stop by and actually find me there will be Tuesday afternoon after 2:30 and until 4ish.

C'mon everyone, let's jump! Jump with me!

2007-05-04T21:29:00.000-06:00

One last late-breaking extra credit chance

2007-04-29T13:39:00.000-06:00

Click on the image to view a larger version. To earn extra credit, you must attend the event and write a short (1-2 page) response paper.

What happens next?

2007-04-28T14:21:00.000-06:00

If you want to be a famous novelist, one thing you might want to do (after years of study and preparation) is write an ending for an unfinished novel left behind when a famous writer died. This is exactly how Mizumura Minae made her debut as a novelist in 1990. She completed Sôseki's Meian, the novel he was writing when he died. If you are curious about her Zoku Meian, you can ask me about it and also check out this link about one of her other works. Mizumura was a guest of UI's International Writing Program several years ago, and I'll be teaching her work in the fall. I also took a class with her back in 1991, and she was very smart(!), nice, and funny.

Why do I mention this? Well, I think some novels really invite us to imagine more, to think about what happens next. (This obviously isn't limited to novels that are literally "unfinished.") I think LHK definitely leaves room for lots of speculation and imagination. I often imagine what I'd like to happen next, and maybe some of you will or maybe already are doing this.

What would you like to see happen next? You can write another paragraph or two, describe a 4th chapter, or engage this question any way you'd like.

follow-up links

2007-04-28T13:52:00.000-06:00

Shiho alerted us to this link, and Caitlin A. (not "our" Caitlin, but the "other" Caitlin who joined us last night) wrote and asked me to share this link, which includes the photo of the grandfathers of Bush and Abe.

Speaking of photos, one thing Prof. Fujii and I regret is that we forgot to take a picture last night. We did get plenty of pictures with my other class, but he thoroughly enjoyed meeting you all and couldn't stop talking about how bright and informed you all are. I'm thinking we should take a class photo next week and send it to him.

Shiho also mentioned having some trouble tracking down the document Prof. Fujii mentioned. It is tricky to locate. You can go to japan.usembassy.gov/, look under "Hot Topics," click on "Annual Regulatory Reforms," and then access the documents from there, but I think the easiest way to see it is to click directly here and then open the 2006-2007 press release and the "recommendations" (the latter is the document Prof. Fujii meant). Page 8 may be of particular interest.

Finally,click here if you'd like to listen to the interview two members of my other class conducted with Prof. Fujii on Thursday. In the interview, he discusses reactions to the V-Tech shootings at UC-Irvine, his own childhood and family background, and many other topics not covered in his public lecture.

Reminder: Jim Fujii here this week!

2007-04-24T19:42:00.000-06:00

Don't forget that Professor Jim Fujii of the University of California-Irvine will be speaking for our class (and others) on Friday. Please don't forget that we will meet in 218 Phillips Hall instead of our regular classroom.

At 6:30, we'll head over to Pizza on Dubuque (around the corner from our class building) for a pizza party with Prof. Fujii.

LHK Chapter #2

2007-04-22T12:43:00.000-06:00

Hoshino-san with Sakai-san, the Japan Studies librarian at UI, at last year's New Nationalisms symposium.

This week, I'm giving you a series of questions. You don't need to answer all of them, but I want to give you some points to engage and consider. Feel free to bring up your own questions and ideas too. At the end of this post is some additional material for those of you who can read Japanese.

1. In Inoue's chapter, the word "Majesty" always appears in bold print. This word does not appear in bold print in Iroha's chapter. How do you interpret this?

2. Colors are often very vivid and described in detail in this novel. For example, we encounter lots of variations of the color yellow (turmeric, gold, lemon etc.). Which colors strike you as significant and why?

3. Compare and contrast the personalities of Inoue and Iroha.

4. Where does Iroha go after the "incident" at the Sleeping Café? What is this place like? Does it remind you of anything?

5. How do you understand the incident at the café? What do you make of Mikoto's words and actions?

6. Explain the title of the second chapter.

7. How do you understand the relationships among the following: Inoue's document, subsequent incidents, media attention, politics, and social problems?

8. Shiho mentioned that she interpreted the word "okami" (which I translated as "Majesty") as a woman shopkeeper and not as an emperor at first. How is her understandable reaction addressed in the second chapter?

9. Where does Mokuren's money seem to come from and how do you understand the various work she does?

10. For those who know Japanese: Kisaragi and Udzuki are the names of two characters in Chapter Two. Februarie and Abril are unsatisfactory translations of these names. What might be some different or better ways to translate these names?

11. What do you think of Iroha's mom? Why?

12. What roles do the mass media play in the second chapter? Describe an example that supports your answer.

13. What can you say about the political climate during the "Love Suicide Era" (or the years following the incident involving Inoue and Mikoto)?

14. What would a "world without Majesty" be like?

15. How do you understand the scenes Iroha sees in the water?

16. I think this novel raises some really important questions about "security." More specifically, I think it challenges some contemporary notions of "national" and personal "security." What do you think? Do you agree/disagree and why?

17. Do you think the concept of "celebrity" is important to this novel so far? Why or why not?

18. The word "Japanese" only appears once in the novel. When? Where? Is that important? Why or why not?

19. Who is Terujirô Kishi? Does his name seem important to anyone? What do you think of him?

20. As I mentioned in class last time, this is a really richly layered novel. Which themes and issues raised in Chapter Two seem the most important to you and why?

Those of you who can read Japanese should check out Hoshino-san's blog and home page. You can also read the following post and perhaps tell your classmates about it:

私の長篇『ロンリー・ハーツ・キラー』は、いわば現代の「堕落論」とも言える。小説の最後のフレーズはそのように受け取ってほしい。[Note: If you finished the book already, please don't give away the ending when/if you write about this for your classmates.]

　では何からの堕落か？

　第1章では、語り手たち神隠しあった者らは、ある啓示を得る。霊的な超越者との一体感といおうか。それは流行りの言葉で言えば、「美しい国」である。その啓示に従って語り手たちは、「美しい国」の住人となるべく、個人である自分を捨てる。

　第2章以降に主役となるのが、「美しい国」の住人になる資格を最初から与えられていない者たちである。「美しい国」がじつは周到な排除のうえに成り立っていることが、最初から弾かれている者たちの目に映る光景として、明らかにされていく。しかも、突きつめるほど、「美しい国」を信じた者たちを含め、じつは誰も住人となる資格など持っていないことがわかってくる。

　では「美しい国」をどうしたらいいのか？　そんなものは本当にあるのか。

　そこで「堕落論」の登場である。「美しい国」などどこにもないのだ、排除を謳う啓示とは幻影に過ぎないのだ、誰もがそこから排除されているのが「美しい国」なのであれば、排除された者たちの溜まり場たる現世へ立ち返って、目を覚ます以外に居場所はない。

　その意味で、『ロンリー・ハーツ・キラー』は、「美しい国」から下りよ堕ちよ、と呼びかける書である。

　むろん、『ロンリー・ハーツ・キラー』には、「美しい国」という貧しい言葉などどこにも出てこない。啓示としてある以上、それだけの強さと喚起力のあるヴィジョンとして登場する。1章の語り手たちがまがりなりにもその世界へ飛び込んでいこうとするだけの、道理と強い磁力のあるヴィジョンとしたつもりだ。

　そんなことを、近々文庫化されるためのゲラを読み直しつつ、考えたのだった。
2007年3月3日（土）

Let's all take a moment on her birthday ...

2007-04-20T00:00:00.000-06:00

... to wish a very happy birthday to STEPHANIE!!!! And a very belated happy birthday to JASON! And while we're at it, we can wish an early happy birthday to Prof. Jim Fujii!

Virginia Tech

2007-04-17T22:00:00.000-06:00

In 1997, I was visiting an elementary school in a suburb outside of Tokyo for some research I was doing. A student asked me to visit her music class, and the teacher agreed. I sat in the back of the room, listening as the kids played their recorders. While the kids played, an earthquake hit. It was substantial enough to knock some things off a shelf and rattle chairs and music stands. The teacher kept directing the students as if nothing happened. After the song was over, she put down her baton and gave students instructions for the next class. The kids looked around while they played and afterwards too, searching for signs of validation of what they'd experienced in their classmates' eyes. Maybe my presence somehow made the teacher uncomfortable enough not to acknowledge the reality that they'd all just felt an earthquake. I can't know. But I do know that it was weird for the students to experience something real and have their teacher act as if nothing had happened. I think the kids would have been less freaked out if she'd simply said, "That was an earthquake, wasn't it?" The memory of that day was enough to convince me I should do away with my class plan on the first day of classes at UC Irvine in late September of 2001. I told my students, all of whom were first year undergrads starting their college careers, to talk about how they felt about current events, especially their fears. Since then, at UCI and Stanford and now UI, I make it a habit not to act as if we lived in a vacuum when wars, tsunamis, hurricanes, shootings, etc. happen. This post is for you all to share your thoughts, feelings, and responses to recent events at Virgina Tech. Given the subject matter of some of our readings, I think it's especially important to acknowledge the news. While it's always the case, for this post in particular, I ask that you be very sensitive and generous with one another. Try to keep your comments focused on how you feel.

Extra Credit Post (includes lots of spoilers)

2007-04-15T19:51:00.000-06:00

Questions:

1. Does Yu Miri challenge stereotypes of "teen killers" in this novel?

2. Describe Kazuki's thoughts on the police and schools. Do you think his views seem reasonable? Why or why not?

3. Why does Kazuki fire Shimamura, the housekeeper? What is significant about this?

4. When the father (Hidetomo) is beating Miho, the narrator says, "When words lost their meaning, violence was the only thing you could count on." Describe two things that strike you as significant about this statement.

5. What is Kazuki's father (Hidetomo) doing immediately before he is killed? What do you think is significant about this detail?

Ideas to Consider:
Remember when I showed you the clip from GO and talked about the word kireru? What does that word mean again?

Although this verb is frequently invoked to describe inexplicable rage or sudden violence, the kireru moment we watched together was, in my interpretation, a response to cumulative stress. He “loses it,” but he loses it for a reason – or multiple reasons.

Now, this word was hard to miss in the late 1990s in Japan, a time when it seemed like teenagers everywhere, especially boys, were ready to go ballistic. While it may have seemed as if suddenly there was a problem, that a volatile presence had been introduced into a peaceful society, it's not as if youth violence had never happened or been represented before. In fact, a literary legacy of violent youth is evident throughout the history of modern Japanese literature. We've encountered it in Sôseki and Ôe, for example. So, the image of the teenage killer in the late 1990s had its literary (in addition to historical) antecedents.

Occasionally, these histories were acknowledged, as was the case with an advertising campaign for Gold Rush, which was published one year after the 14 year-old "Sakakibara" boy in Kobe killed the other children. The promotional band around the cover of the hardback edition of Gold Rush asked, “Why did the 14 year-old youth kill?” While Kazuki is VERY different from the boy in the news, Yu Miri was clearly responding to the real-life case. Underneath this question about why would a kid kill, there were three years with corresponding authors and book titles:

1956: Mishima Yukio, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
1980: Murakami Ryû, Coin Locker Babies
1998: Yû Miri, Gold Rush

At the same time that we might have been encouraged to see certain representations of youth violence as new, therefore, we were also periodically reminded, here for the purposes of assigning Yû Miri a place in a literary lineage, that we had seen this sort of thing before.

For the Japanese media, stories about youth violence come marked in advance with the promise of sensational violence or lurid spectacle -- surer paths to sales and profits than thoughtful articles that discuss the complexities of young people's experiences. Just this past New Year's, it was impossible to avoid stories about a a boy who killed and cut up his sister (who was an aspiring model/actress/singer, I think).

But the story shifts if we look to different tellers -- like kids:

Four months after the “Sakakibara” murders, an anonymous boy who was 14, the same age as the killer, was quoted in a national news magazine as being heartened that, at least, this tragedy might motivate adults to think seriously about how ninth graders feel and what life is like for them.

In letters and articles sent to newspapers, many other Japanese youth expressed similar sentiments. For example, in a letter to the Asahi Junior High School Student Newspaper in 1998, a 13-year old girl responded to yet another headline story of youth violence. Here are some excerpts from her letter.

My first thought was that a junior high school student just like me has murdered somebody again. I was shocked, but I also felt sympathy. It’s strange for kids to be expected to live up to principles and standards that adults can’t live up to. [. . .] We hear news stories about corrupt politicians and all sorts of unethical scandals. How can a society led by adults like that raise good kids? [. . .] I’d like [adults] to understand that they do have some responsibility in this. Because they are the ones making a society that leads people to crime. [. . .] Before they worry about banning the sale of knives or other weapons, they should work on fostering a better society. I want them to make a society where we can believe in something. But maybe this is just idealistic dreaming.

Do you think she is overly idealistic? Does her reaction make sense to you? What do you think a girl who feels this way might think about the novel?

Yû Miri (柳美里) was born in 1968, so she's the same age as me.

Links for further reading:
"A rebel in Japan clings to her freedom"

"The Supreme Court Can't Stop Gold Rush"

The author's website (in Japanese)

"Dead End Kids"

The "Election" Results

2007-04-14T13:44:00.000-06:00

I may not have been happy about the election results in Tokyo recently, but I'm pleased to report that our class has voted, and here's what the people wanted:

Gold Rush is now an extra credit reading. In the coming days, I will make a special post for this text, and anyone who chooses to read it may earn extra credit for writing substantive comments about the reading. You have until the last day of classes this semester to earn extra credit by reading this novel.

Our last three weeks of class will be devoted to a close reading of Lonely Hearts Killer. This image is the cover of the original Japanese hardback edition of the novel. You can see a larger version by clicking on the image here. You should read Chapter One for next week, Chapter Two for the following week, and Chapter Three for the last week of class. This is a significantly slower pace than we've had thus far, and, as Alecs suggested in class, we'll now have the opportunity to discuss the text in greater detail. Keep in mind that Prof. Jim Fujii will visit our class to give a lecture on April 27th, so the discussion that week will engage the topic of his talk, which relates to the novel in many ways even though the subject matter might seem a little different. So we won't actually have 3 weeks devoted exclusively to the novel.

I also want to echo something Traci said last night. We are all "teaching" one another as we work our way through these conversations about the fiction we read. Every week, I am humbled and often blown away by the work you all are doing.

For those of you who were unable to attend the New Nationalisms symposium last year, you might want to check out the symposium blog and search through the archived posts for information on Hoshino Tomoyuki. I will have much more to share about him in the coming weeks, of course.

Lonely Hearts Killer was published in 2004, so, as promised at the beginning of the semester, we will have covered a century of long Japanese prose fiction in one semester. Keep in mind that any time you take a survey course like this, your syllabus will be shaped by the subjectivity of the instructor. What you read will be shaped by what that person has learned, as well as that person's tastes, interests, politics, and experiences. The picture of 20th and 21st century Japanese novels that you might take away from this class (or any other survey class) is, therefore, partial at best, incomplete, and shaped by who I am. There's so much more out there to read, and I hope this experience has made you excited to explore more.

Scholarship Announcement

2007-04-12T01:31:00.000-06:00

Helen K. Fairall Scholarship
2007 - 2008
For Students In
Asian Languages and Literature

The Department of Asian Languages and Literature is pleased to announce TWO scholarship opportunities of approximately $4000 each for two students in the Department who meet the following criteria:

1. Junior, Senior, or Graduate student majors in Asian Languages and Literature (non-majors and minors are not eligible);

2. Cumulative GPA of at least 3.0 and enrolled full-time both Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 (12 s.h. for undergraduates and 9 s.h. for graduates);

3. Born in Iowa and educated in Iowa schools in grades one through eight and returned after completing their secondary education to enroll at The University of Iowa, or to persons born in Iowa who are graduates of Iowa high schools;

4. The scholarships are not to be awarded using need as a primary criterion.

5. Award recipients must be enrolled in a degree program both semesters of 2007 - 2008; and the GPA consideration is based solely on work completed at the U of I.

6. Recipients may apply the scholarship award toward a study-abroad program.

• A student who wishes to be nominated by the Department for this scholarship must submit the following materials to Merry Bullock, Asian Languages and Literature, 111 Phillips Hall, by Friday, April 27, 2007.

1. An updated official transcript (must include Fall 2006 grades) – (you may check with us to see if we already have a copy in your student academic file);

2. Cover letter describing your eligibility with regard to point #3 above;

3. Essay of no more than 500 words describing how your study in the department is important in your career goals.

Scholarships will be awarded for the 2007 - 2008 academic year. Recipients will be notified by the Office of Student Financial Aid in May 2007.

DEADLINE: FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 2007

April 27th plan

2007-04-10T17:54:00.000-06:00

Click above to see a larger version of the wonderful poster designed by UI student John Nedved.

Our class on April 27th will be very special. It will begin with the following talk, which is sponsored by the UI Center for Asian and Pacific Studies. After the talk, CAPS is treating our entire class and Prof. Fujii to dinner at Pizza on Dubuque, where we will have the chance to chat with Prof. Fujii and discuss his talk and modern Japanese literature. The following are the details on his talk. Please note that we will meet in 218 Phillips Hall that afternoon.

Local Currency Movements in Millennial, Occupied Japan
Professor James A. Fujii
The University of California-Irvine

Friday, April 27, 2007
5-6:30pm
218 Phillips Hall
The University of Iowa campus

In 1999 Japan had only three or four alternative currency projects, where local currencies, instead of yen, were established to provide a variety of grassroots social and local community services. Two years later the number would jump to eighty programs, and in five years time the total would exceed 600, stretching from Okinawa to Hokkaido. How might we explain this dramatic surge in alternative currency based projects, and what do they have to do with a contemporary Japan that, I will argue, is effectively under U.S. occupation today, over sixty years after the end of WWII? This presentation uses currency as a way to examine present day Japan as a kind of case study revealing what globalization and empire mean today.

Professor James Fujii was my Ph.D. advisor and mentor, and he specializes in modern Japanese literature and cultural studies. You might be interested to learn about his groundbreaking book Complicit Fictions: the Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative and the first English-language volume of writings by acclaimed Japanese cultural critic Maeda Ai (Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity), which Prof. Fujii edited. He has also written about the impact of railway technologies and cultures on Japanese daily life, fascism and the nation state, the discipline of Japan studies, and a wide range of international issues related to social justice. I am proud to have been his student and am really excited at this chance to share him with you all.

Meiji Religions and Amrita

2007-04-10T07:05:00.000-06:00

I. Meiji Religions: an Extra Credit Talk
Here's a reminder of one more extra credit opportunity this semester. You can attend the following talk (and be excused for coming late to class) and earn extra credit by writing a short response paper (1-2 pages).

Friday, April 13, 2007
Public lecture: "Meiji Religions or the Japanese Discovery of Universality?" by Dr. Michel Mohr, Visiting scholar, Dept. of Religious Studies, Brown University
4:00 pm
Atrium on the 3th Floor, Gilmore Hall

I've heard very positive things about Dr. Mohr, and I'm sure it will be an interesting talk.

II. Amrita
Now that we have the forgotten (or ignored or lost) voices in Amrita foregrounded after last week's class, what do you think of the story? Did last week's class change how you read it at all?

If you're interested, you can see the author's website in English and in Japanese.

Murakami Ryû was 12 when Yoshimoto Banana was born and named Yoshimoto Mahoko in 1964. That was seven years after Ôe wrote Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids and almost forty years after Takiji was writing the novels we read.

a map that will be useful for us

2007-04-05T22:37:00.000-06:00

What role do the Mariana Islands play in your life? Or what role do you play in the lives of people living in the Mariana Islands?

Two extra credit opportunities

2007-04-05T12:05:00.000-06:00

Both of the following events will overlap with our class. If you choose to go, you will be excused from the first part of class (class still will be held as usual). To get credit, you'll need to write a 2-page response paper about the talk you attended. This paper will be due by the last day of class.

TOMORROW: Friday, April 6, 2007
Public lecture: "Gender Struggles: Radical Women and Male Dominant Unions in Postwar Japan" by Prof. Christopher Gerteis, Dept. of History, Creighton University
4:00 pm
302 Schaeffer Hall

Friday, April 13, 2007
Public lecture: "Meiji Religions or the Japanese Discovery of Universality?" by Dr. Michel Mohr, Visiting scholar, Dept. of Religious Studies, Brown University
4:00 pm
Atrium on the 3th Floor, Gilmore Hall

Virtual Class

2007-04-02T14:17:00.000-06:00

This will be an unusually long post. It is a "class" after all. I’ll indicate places where I hope you’ll jump in with thoughts, questions, rants, and/or raves, but feel free to make any sorts of comments and questions to anything else below. Because this is really long, I decided to decorate the "classroom" with lots of ranunculus, because I like them. Hopefully you will too. It was either ranunculus or monkeys. Hope I made the right choice.

Introduction to the Virtual Class:

As your ongoing discussions and your answers to the assigned questions indicate, there are LOTS of ways to enter into the world of CLB and understand (and respond to) it. As is so often the case, some of our reactions say more about ourselves, but there's no question that the text itself is shaped by the subjectivity of the author. Although I can't recall where exactly I read this, Murakami Ryû either wrote or said that he wrote the book almost on a dare. Apparently, a friend of his had challenged him to try writing a really "long work" (or said that he couldn't) and this was the result of that challenge. [Sidenote: A similar desire to see whether or not she could write something really long fueled Yoshimoto Banana's Amrita, our next work.] Traci described CLB as an open-ended text, and there certainly are lots of unanswered questions. What, for example, is the deal with "that dumb robot Kuwayama"? We learn of his nightly drinking, and Angela and Traci noted some passages in which he comes across as perhaps not much of a father. Jacob, Shiori, and Brendan agreed, but Randy, Richard, and Jason thought he was portrayed with sensitivity in the sense that he didn't appear to be outright abusive and that readers might feel sorry for him as less important to Hashi than Milk. Their reading (which prioritizes their own sympathies and feelings as readers over those of the main characters) reminds us of how much power we can have as readers to determine what any given story means to us.

But … that doesn’t mean we should feel satisfied with a kind of extreme relativism that tells us the text is neutral and we all can love it or leave it. And that’s what this virtual class will be exploring.

I just looked for and found the passage I had in mind above. We can think about how the author wants us to experience reading CLB, how he wants us to see this novel, and use the following as a starting point.

This comes from the afterward to the Japanese edition of this novel. He addresses the reader who just finished the book:

I wanted to write a long novel.

A buddy of mine since high school warned me, “You don’t have a marketable full-length novel in you. Your style is more like a water color than a formal oil painting, more like a photograph than a film, more like a short piano piece than a full symphony.” [...]

I searched for a direction that would be my own. [...]

With every ounce of my energy dashing forward like a marathon runner passing the 42k and then the 195k marks, I thought about writing it hundreds of times. It would take an energy swell, so I waited for it to build up. It didn’t take tranquility and relaxation for my batteries to get fully charged to the max. Instead it took countless distractions.[...]

I wrote it as if I had kicked a bike into full throttle. Did my fever reach you? September, 1980

What kind of public persona do you think he’s trying to create in this afterward? Is it affected? Is it macho? Is it “cool”? What kinds of things does he associate with himself and his creativity? Sports? Motorcycles? Fever? What do you make of his message?

I. Elaborating on the "Reality Effect"

As we’ve discussed, CLB takes bits and fragments of social reality and blows them up to the level of the spectacle. There were actual incidents involving babies left in coin lockers before the novel was written (in 1980), for example. Very real social problems are thus magnified, distorted, or exaggerated.

CLB also takes us through real and identifiable places, like Kamakura and Nagasaki, in addition to completely make-believe places, like Toxitown. We see reference to real events, such as the mass-suicides at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978, when all the followers of the Reverend Jim Jones drank Grape Kool-Aid laced with cyanide (and what the author calls datura, but what I think was actually Phenobarbitol). But we also find entirely made-up events, such as the Japanese flame throwing police brigades.

Throughout the novel, different words, places, and events, are removed from (or disarticulated from) their ordinary referents by being placed alongside the more sci-fi or fantasy elements, and this technique lends a certain “reality effect” to the make-believe. Alecs described this very well in class when he said, the effect made the unreal things seem more real and the real things seem less real.

As you might guess, what gets tweaked and what remains "real" has a lot to do with Murakami Ryû's aesthetics, so it probably is worth thinking a bit about who this guy is.

II. The Author
I already mentioned that Murakami Ryû is a full-blown celebrity, someone who has even had his own tv shows.

Born in Nagasaki in 1952 (6 years before Ôe wrote Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids), Murakami Ryû was 28 when he wrote CLB. His debut novel was Almost Transparent Blue, which, to me, is a very upsetting tale about Japanese youth who party with US soldiers on the Yokota (US) military base. I think I already told you what I don’t like about that book when I talked about how Black people and Filipina/os are depicted in CLB, but the literary establishment liked Almost Transparent Blue and awarded it the Akutagawa Literary Award in 1976, and millions of copies were sold.

Murakami’s other works (fiction and non-fiction) have been filled with everything from sexual violence and murder to the drug ecstasy and financial scandals. His non-fiction book What could we have done with the money? (Ano Kane de Nani ga Kaeta ka) details (somewhat humorously) his ideas of better ways money that the Japanese government forked over to banks in the 1980s could have been spent.

So, here, as was the case with Mishima, we’re dealing with a writer who addresses violence, death, sex, and politics -- although Murakami Ryû’s politics are kind of different from Mishima’s. We can also add drugs into the mix with Murakami.

I also told you that sometimes Murakami says some sharp stuff, especially related to youth violence. I shared an example in class. I told you a bit about the “Sakakibara” boy and mentioned that I’d tell you more in a few weeks. Here are some comments Murakami Ryû made in response to the Sakakibara boy’s murders:

In the end, nobody knows why that boy killed, why he beheaded another child. Maybe he doesn’t even know. [...]

There is nothing that’s going to make kids happy. Saying something like, “Okay, let’s work hard now to cheer up today” is really depressing from their vantage point. Invariably some adult says, “You kids will be carrying the weight of the 21st century on your shoulders. You’ll be leaders, so cheer up and work hard.” That’s like saying you’ve got food, shelter, clothing -- the bare necessities -- what the hell do you have to feel bad about? It’s basically a threat.

You can add that to the quote I shared with you last week.

He has also made comments about the youth who don’t go to school, the futôkô phenomenon (not advancing/rising in school). Have I talked about this yet? About kids "opting out" of/dropping out of school? Murakami claims “the big lie” (that education = success) is breaking apart and that reality is trying to tear through all the façades of the “system.” He thinks that kids who stop going to school are breaking out of the “big lie.”

Murakami clearly has a certain sensitivity to disaffected, sad, frustrated, and angry kids – well, specifically angry boys. I think it’s safe to say this is because he makes an empathic leap, he tries to imagine why boys might be really angry. Many of you commented on this as related to “back story.” There seem to to be different degrees of back story in CLB though. Several of you thought Ortega Saitô was depicted with sensitivity because we know something of his background. When I first read that section, I felt like Murakami was making fun of him, that the scene was so “over-the-top” as to preclude sympathy (kind of like Jerry Springer shows). Obviously, that’s not the only way to respond.

But he's clearly not sensitive to everybody. He's not making empathic leaps for all his characters. Now, that might be unavoidable when you write a book with lots and lots of characters, but the patterns are troubling, at least they are very troubling to me. What do you think?

III. Drugs

I want to say more about drugs and about psychotropic medications.

We obviously can’t avoid thinking about psychopharmaceuticals and other drugs while we read this novel. Datura shapes much of the plot, but we see other references to drugs as well. This is common in Murakami’s work.

The subject of psychotropic medication and perceptions of reality we discussed a few weeks ago is very relevant to discussions of youth violence given not only the recreational use of drugs by many kids, but the medicating of feeling states that is practiced widely on young so-called “violent” populations. This is not just a before vs. after incarceration issue. And the "cause and effect" issues are also not so simple.

We know Andy Williams, the kid in the Santana High School shooting in California, and Eric Harris of Columbine, for example, were prescribed and were taking medications such as Luvox. And when young people are arrested and imprisoned in Japan or the US, one of the first things that happens is that they are medicated. Did I talk with you about this already? If not, remind me to do so in class.

Regardless how one feels, we cannot deny that drugs -- both prescribed and recreational -- are a part of many kids’ cultural and everyday realities in the US & in Japan.

To think about how drugs function in the world of CLB, I want to refer to a movie that I think is familiar to most (if not all) of you.

In The Matrix Keanu Reeves (Neo) meets Lawrence Fishburn (Morpheus), who plays a sort of sci-fi revolutionary leader. LF offers KR a choice of 2 pills after they talk a bit. Do you all remember that scene? The effects of the two pills can help us think of ways to read CLB. One pill “woke you up” out of the tremendous and totalizing (forced) denial of a horrific reality, the reality that you were, in effect, unconscious and enslaved. The process of waking up was very painful and scary, but it was “true.” What about the other pill? It let you forget that you had a choice and let you stay in the state of denial, which although perhaps less scary, was literally killing people in the movie, keeping them enslaved.

In this movie, to be a hero, to be Keanu Reeves’ character, you have to choose to wake up, out of the denial and face the horrible truths even though they are ugly and scary.

In the movie, both roads require a pill -- one a pill that expands your mind and one that keeps it in a controlled fog. A non-medicated life is not presented, at least initially, as a choice for Keanu Reeves. You have to take one pill or the other (at least at that moment).

What are the options available to Kiku and Hashi in CLB? Do they have opportunities to decline medication? Do they find alternative means of self-medication without pills? And why would they need to feel soothed in the first place? What upsets, agitates, or ails them?

I asked you what are some things that psychotropic drugs (antipsychotics, antidepressants, etc.) do? You all had some great ideas, and then I added that they ease symptoms, regulate feeling states, and inhibit certain neural or hormonal activity.

Well, through sports and singing, can Kiku and Hashi achieve similar effects in terms of self-soothing? How effective are those efforts?

A larger question that CLB raises about drugs, as I said in class, is: what happens if the symptom is masked, but the cause is never addressed --if the feeling state is regulated but the problem is still there, then what happens? What do you think?

In the book, Hashi and Kiku are treated by a psychiatrist. As the book goes on, in addition to looking for the truth of their origins, they also go through a painful process of “waking up” from the treatment and remembering what it was.

Was this treatment effective?

In a very broad sense, Kiku and Hashi are depicted as “system kids” -- abandonned, brought into an orphanage, and eventually adopted, and, in Kiku’s case, later incarcerated Let’s think about them as “system kids” for a bit.

IV. System Kids

When I talk about system kids, I’m talking about kids we institutionalize – whether as wards of the court, foster youth in group homes, or youth in so-called “correctional” institutions. These would be kids whose lives and sometimes even identities are deeply affected by juvenile and family courts, for example.

How does Kiku get his name?

What is the pecking order of adoption described in the novel?

In many places in the US too, when system kids get older, they are labeled “unadoptable.” When I was working with abused youth in California, by the time a child got to the age of 10, the system basically gave up on the hope of adoption for them and the kid would be given a permanent plan in foster care or group homes. Older adoptions are so rare as to be statistically negligible. So a child who enters the system at 10 or 12 or older has virtually no chance of being adopted. (The county I worked in had over 4,000 new kids brought into the system each year.)

There are some ways in which the boys’ early years are consistent with what we do see with system kids who were abused or abandoned. An abused or otherwise wounded kid’s emotional state can range from a baseline of unease to extremes of anxiety, panic, and despair. In that kind of situation, you can imagine that ordinary means of self-soothing are just not enough.

The deliberate infliction of injury on the self or others is one way some traumatized system kids find to self-soothe. We see this in CLB too

Kiku and Hashi experience all sorts of symptoms. Kiku is often agitated -- he feels a need for constant motion, to get away, as if something bad will happen if he isn’t moving. Hashi tries to control appearances, such as the way his model world looks, even though he may have little or no control over other things in his life. Both boys go to off-limits places, do dangerous things, and make decisions that seem to hurt themselves along the way.

What do you make of that?

But they also, at times, derive a tremendous source of power through their own affiliation, through their connection. This becomes especially clear when Hashi runs away. Kiku suddenly feels unable to clear the bar when he is pole vaulting, because he notices Hashi isn’t there -- he feels, for a bit, that he needs Hashi to WITNESS the jump for it to be real. There are many other examples demonstrating the degree to which they are connected that you’ve encountered in your readings. However, their efforts at self-soothing continue to be different -- Hashi seeks sounds and physical changes and Kiku seeks motion, flying. The narrator makes sure we don’t forget this at various points, as if he’s reminding us: hey, don’t forget these are symptoms -- these kids were born in coin lockers.

We get a clear example of the dangers of making assumptions about why someone experiences a particular sensation or feeling when Miss Kanae hypnotizes Hashi.

However unintentionally, we can end up doing damage by asking questions that assume a common frame of experience. Miss Kanae assumes going back to being a baby would be “neat,” when in fact it is very painful. To me, this is a crucial scene and one I’d like the author himself to think more about when he writes female characters and non-Japanese characters. This sort of thing happens to system kids in school when teachers ask the class to “draw a picture of your parents” or “draw a picture of your family.” The teachers aren’t trying to be mean probably, but to a kid like Hashi or Kiku, these questions can trigger an escalation from daily “unease” to full-blown panic, anxiety, or rage, like we see in Kiku’s response to the hypnotism. We can perhaps see this as rage that comes from not being “seen,” from having people make assumptions that remind you of painful things.

This episode also leaves Hashi very disrupted if you’ll remember. He disappears, and we find out they discovered him later in the public toilet after what? A sexual assault?

After Hashi is taken home, we see him stop talking to people and stop going to school. This is a retreat to a dissociative state. When I say he retreats to a dissociative state, I mean he “checks out” and ends up naked from the waist down in the toilet, ends up shutting down with others back home, something we learn more about later after he accesses this particular memory.

In this passage, we also see a tendency to self-blame, which is also common among traumatized youth (and some adults too). Hashi asks Kiku, “Do you know how nasty I really am?” Hashi sees himself as “nasty,” as being somehow inherently bad. He internalizes the role of the messed up youth.

We also see how Hashi doubts his own perceptions and doubts himself as he tries to distance himself from the past. He fears that people will find out how “nasty” he is, so that construction of the “bad self” sticks. Of course, others do doubt him too, such as the reporters who think he’s making it up when he cuts his own tongue.

For both Hashi and Kiku, are there any experiences that provide any “healing” that seems effective? Can they attach words to their feelings? When? Are those moments ever sustained?

V. So what?

Okay, given the wide array of difficult moments and traumatic moments -- their births, the psychiatric treatment, the octopus scene, the dogs, the hypnotism, Toxitown, etc., we might think Murakami’s efforts to include the psychological consequences are pretty admirable. After all, real trauma does affect real people. And, there are lots of moments when he makes sure the narrator reminds us which responses are lingering symptoms, connected to the original difficult experiences.

But:

We’re also left with just as many passages in which the narrator himself seems to provoke trauma in the reader or he adopts a kind of distanced aestheticization of violence like we saw in Mishima.

Murakami uses some pretty jarring metaphors, right? Remember the following? “The bike collapsed with a rusty squeal, like a pig having a spike driven into its head.” WTF? That is not Hashi’s thought; it’s the narrator’s metaphor. It sets a tone, conforms to an aesthetic, lends an atmosphere to the book. And, as some of you wrote, it can seem really gratuitous, really random, really unnecessary.

We also get graphic descriptions of situations that can wound some readers, especially folks who have experienced real violence, including sexual violence.

How do we reconcile the 2 issues: the sensitivity and the insensitivity?

How do we reconcile the way CLB DOES IN SOME PASSAGES PRECISELY WHAT IT SEEKS TO CRITIQUE IN OTHERS?

This is why I gave you that assignment.

I’m hoping you have noticed by now that Murakami’s Ryû’s insensitivity to those with whom he refuses to identify ends up seeming like he is making fun of or dismissing many of the exact same problems he takes seriously with Kiku and Hashi when they involve a character for whom he doesn't seem to care as much.

Ortega Saito’s triggered childhood memories might, to some, seem “pathetic” or, at least, fleeting and inconsequential - unlike the childhood memories of the main characters, whose suffering and responses to suffering keep the plot running.

I wanted you to think about the gap between whose suffering matters and whose doesn’t. There are so many gender-based, racial, and ethnic stereotypes in CLB that are so gratuitous that one can wonder why they’re even included -- especially in a work that Murakami seems to be using to make a point about youth violence. Why are they there? What does that tell us?

That many of these kinds of stereotypes fuel real violence and hate crimes in Japan (directed at women through rape and sexual assault, violence directed at Filipinos or other Asians living and working in Japan, etc.) means we cannot ignore them or write them off as "no big deal." Such representations can actually harm individuals and communities by perpetuating negative images of different groups and also by fueling existing prejudice or hatred. This is especially dangerous because of the “reality effect” that I explained earlier. You may want to consider, for example, how a book like this might shape a young Japanese reader’s views of Filipinos.

A reader would get the hotel cleaning woman’s descriptions of “Filipino hookers” & Tatsuo’s traveling lounge act “freakish” family, for example. The Japanese dominant culture and governing elites have long depicted the Philippines, and, by extension, Filipinos, as “backward” and “childish” or “low-class” and in “need” of Japan’s “guiding hand (not unlike white supremacist US historical views of the Philippines, which have been equally arrogant and condescending). Of course, such patronizing and discriminatory views require that we “forget” Filipinas were abducted to be “comfort women” in WWII by the Japanese military (or that the US Navy misled many Filipinos into service with false promises and then denied them their rights, even to benefits).

Readers today might think of Filipinas who are still lured, tricked, or coerced into the Japanese sex industry. Does the book overlook or obscure how many Filipinas are forcibly made to do this and that they are at the mercy of those who took their money and passports or other documentation? How different might the depictions of Filipinas be if Murakami tried to imagine what it felt like to be in that kind of situation?

The list of discriminatory stereotypes is long enough to take up weeks of discussion -- Filipinas as only sex workers or entertainers, women and children as objectified sex objects, homosexuals as “lurking” predators, and I’m sure you can add many more. And, through D, we get the insanely broad (and inaccurate) claim that nobody forces sex workers to do what they do, “nobody’s forcing them to do it,” a huge and sweeping generalization and myth that doesn’t get much of a “comeback” line in the text.

Some stereotypes, such as rock band members as wild and out of control, aren’t as troubling perhaps, but many of the stereoptyes are brutal. We may not recognize them all as such since they are set in the background to the story of Kiku and Hashi as the boys grow up to seek revenge on the women who abandoned them and the society that has failed them.

Even the relationship that seemed okay to some of you, the one with Kiku and Anemone, might seem unconventional, but they still conform to standard gender roles as Angela and Kristin have noted: she cooks for him, he gives her a cookbook, and things like that conform to pretty conventional divisions of women’s roles and men’s roles.

To me, that’s kind of very typical of Murakami Ryû. He might seem subversive and wild, but at the core of his writings are some pretty “old school” ideas.

CONCLUDING QUESTIONS

Many of the things Murakami wrote about in this book have almost seemed to happen. Did you notice any?

One very significant phenomenon CLB anticipates is the televised “real-time” crime. (This already was going on in the 1970s, which I can tell you about in class.)

What event in CLB unfolds on live tv?

Does CLB offer any hope?

A person can, like the captain in CLB, think the answer to Kiku’s problems, his loneliness, and his pain, is in aspiring to the nuclear family ideal. Remember, he says, “Kuwayama, my boy, that’s what you need to do: make yourself a family.” Given what we know about Kiku, however, we can probably imagine that if he started making a family with Anemone while dreaming of Datura destruction, there would probably still be some problems.

Something would need to happen first, something that would give him the skills to feel differently, something the Captain’s suggestion alone cannot offer.

The main characters are all still about how old at the end? 17? What do you think of that?

One last question for everyone, do any of you plan to take my Postwar Family Fictions class (39J: 143) next fall? I ask because I have used CLB in that class before and will not do so if some of you plan to take it.

Your Answers

2007-03-31T13:41:00.000-06:00

Please post your answers to the questions I gave you yesterday in the comments section below by Monday. I'll take it from there!

Available online: Prof. Takahashi Tetsuya's speech in Chicago

2007-03-29T23:27:00.000-06:00

A while back, I posted an announcement on my personal blog about Professor Takahashi Tetsuya's visit to Chicago. He spoke about the Yasukuni shrine. I was sad I couldn't go.

Well, there's a video here! This is NOT required for this class, but I encourage any of you who are interested in contemporary Japan and Japanese politics to watch this!

Asian Pacific American Heritage Week at UI!!

2007-03-29T22:12:00.001-06:00

There's a lot going on for Asian Pacific Heritage Week!

Next Wednesday, April 4th, you can attend Our History is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese Cuban Generals in The Cuban Revolution at 3:30pm. Location: the Ohio State Room (343) of the IMU.

You can learn more here.

Click on any of these images to see larger versions.

Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani

2007-03-28T19:08:00.000-06:00

I just received the following story (published in today's Japan Times) from my teacher (whom you will meet later this semester). Given our studies of Takiji and Barefoot Gen, I thought you all might appreciate the story of this man. If you want to read the whole article, click here. (This story picks up on themes Alexander mentions in his comments to an earlier an post, and I'm sure the rest of you can also make plenty of connections to issues we've discussed in class.)

"Japanese-American's life story moves New York"

By SEANA K. MAGEE

NEW YORK (Kyodo) A proud elderly man in a red beret drags his battered supplies along a busy Soho street corner oblivious to the cold winter.

Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, the subject of the film, "The Cats of Mirikitani," flashes a peace sign on a street in New York.

Billing himself as a "grand master artist," Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani spends his days perfecting his trademark cat paintings in front of the Korean-owned deli that doubles as his studio and home.

The energetic octogenarian is the subject of the 74-minute documentary "The Cats of Mirikitani," which has gone from the film festival circuit and winning the Tribeca Audience Award last year to a theatrical run this month in Manhattan.

Linda Hattendorf, the film's director, first struck up a friendship with the lively senior citizen after buying one of his cat paintings from him. Mirikitani asked her to take his photograph and she returned with a video camera.

"I was shocked to find such an elderly man living on the streets, and thought I would make a document of his life to raise awareness of his situation and that of others like him," Hattendorf said.

The Japanese-American was born around 1920 in Sacramento, Calif., and raised in Hiroshima. When he was a teenager, he returned to the United States to escape
prewar militarism in Japan and to improve his art.

His dreams were dashed by Pearl Habor and the signing of U.S. Executive Order 9066, which sent all Americans of Japanese descent into internment camps. Mirikitani and his sister were put in separate camps.

His pleas to be released on the grounds that he was an artist with no allegiance to Japan were ignored. He spent 3 1/2 years in Tule Lake, Calif., where he was coerced into renouncing his U.S. citizenship.

He was dealt another blow when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and his mother's family was killed.

After the war ended, he remained in captivity. He was held in California, then Texas, and in 1946 he was sent to Seabrook Farms, N.J., to work 12 hours a day sorting vegetables.

Arriving in New York in the early 1950s, he worked as a cook for the artist Jackson Pollock, and then took another job as a live-in house worker. However, when that employer died, he ended up on the street.

"It's rare to find one individual whose life touches on so many current issues -- Jimmy's story addresses homelessness, aging, racial discrimination, war and pacifism, art, community, and the importance of confronting the past," the director said. "Weaving all these strands into a coherent tapestry was not an easy task."

On Sept. 11, 2001, while Hattendorf was filming Mirikitani painting in a city park, two planes struck the World Trade Center and altered the course of her film.

"I couldn't bear to just stand there photographing him coughing in the smoke, and impulsively asked him to come inside," Hattendorf explained. "He lived with me for five months, so the story changed."

Once Mirikitani entered her cramped apartment she became part of his story. Her biggest challenge then became how to place herself in the film without losing focus on the painter.

She credits the film's editor, Keiko Deguchi, and producer, Masa Yoshikawa, for helping to achieve the right balance.

The film shows how, as the pair settled in, the charming but sometimes cantankerous man spent his days painting, singing, cooking, playing with Hattendorf's cat and refusing to discuss social security.

The director began to help him put his life back together. She got him a teaching job and his own apartment. She also looked for his family and eventually contacted Janice Mirikitani, San Francisco's poet laureate and a distant relative, who put them in touch with Mirikitani's sister, Kazuko.

She filmed Mirikitani's first contact with her, by phone, since the two were separated at the internment camps and his rush of emotions afterward.

The director even got a copy of the 1959 letter from the U.S. government, telling Mirikitani he had his U.S. citizenship back. She took him to the West Coast for reunions with his family and accompanied him on a moving trip to Tule Lake with some of the former internees and their families.

One of the more touching scenes in the film is of the former internee looking out over the land where he was once interned. After offering a prayer for the boy who used to bother him to draw pictures of his cats, Mirikitani said: "People know now. I tell everything."

...

The story is significant because it is about "surviving trauma and the possibility of healing -- it's a universal story and a story of hope, which people seem so hungry for these days," she said.

Bougainvillea Pictures

2007-03-24T12:55:00.000-06:00

Love, love, love your comments about bougainvilleas under the earlier post! Those are great. And didn't we all love, love, love Shiho's map drawing of Shinjuku in class? That was great too. Here are some photos of bougainvilleas. The petals are truly, as I mentioned in class, paper-like. And when a bougainvillea takes off and establishes itself, it can cover a large area in stunning color. Often, they are red, bright pink, or purple, but some of my favorites are burnt orange. There are other colors too, but I think the red color is probably the one that most people associate with the flower. For future reference, Hoshino Tomoyuki, the author of our last book this semester (and, I'll admit, my favorite book we'll read together) loves bougainvilleas (and lots of other flowers and plants).

Announcement from Yuma

2007-03-22T22:19:00.000-06:00

Remember Yuma, the cool visitor who joined our class a few times? Well, he wrote to tell me about an upcoming Asian/Asian American film festival hosted by WAVES, a group with which Yuma works. The films will be screened next weekend (March 30th-April 1st), and they are all FREE and open to the public! Good times!

Check out their website by clicking here.

Coin Locker Babies

2007-03-15T13:13:00.000-06:00

Barefoot Gen is set in 1945, but it was written and published in the 1970s. CLB was published in 1980. The author, Murakami Ryû (pictured here) has transformed from a kind of literary "rebel" figure into a mainstream celebrity who hosts television interviews with politicians and comments on everything from "juvenile crime" to the Japanese economy. Sometimes he says really insightful things, and sometimes his words horrify and offend me. I think one could say the same about CLB.

In response to an incident I will discuss in class, Murakami said the following:

「いい学校に行けば、いい会社に入れば、人生は成功っていうのは、すでにウソです。子供たちに、はっきりそれはウソだっていわなければ、フェアじゃない。」

"The idea that if you go to a good school and get a job with a good company, you’ll get ahead in life is a complete and utter lie. It’s unfair for us not to be straight with kids by telling them that's a lie."

He said this about 17 years after writing CLB, but perhaps you might find some similar sentiments developed in the novel.

You might also be interested to know that Sean (son of Yoko and John) Lennon has been working for quite some time to have CLB made into a major motion picture.

Apparently it's scheduled for release next year and stars Val Kilmer as D and Japanese actor Asano Tadanobu and Sean Lennon as Kiku and Hashi.

As you read, you may have questions about datura. Is it real? What can it do? Please feel free to share anything you learn along the way. For starters, you might find the following helpful.

According to the CDC's MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) of August 22, 2003:

**During October 11- November 20, 2002, the Cincinnati Drug and Poison Information Center (DPIC) received notification of and offered treatment advice for 14 adolescents in the Akron/Cleveland, Ohio, area who became ill after intentional exposure to toxic seeds that DPIC identified as Datura inoxia. All became ill shortly after eating the seeds or drinking tea brewed using the seeds. All patients recovered fully after treatment. This report summarizes these cases, discusses the characteristics of the various plants known commonly as "moonflowers," and underscores the need for awareness of the potential toxicity from recreational use of a plant.**

Also, according to "Prevention Colorado," a drug abuse prevention center, some "common effects" of datura include:

Flushing of the Skin
Dilated Pupils
Dry Mucous Membranes
Thirst
Difficulty Swallowing and Speaking
Blurred Vision
Phobia and Panic
Confusion and Agitation
Violent Behavior
Very Vivid Hallucinations (hearing colors or seeing sounds)
Delusion
Attraction to Water

As you get closer to the end of the novel, you might think that Murakami took many of these "common effects" to heart when writing CLB.

What do you think of this novel so far?

Have a great break!

2007-03-09T21:25:00.000-06:00

Thanks to so many (all but 3) of you who came to class on the Friday night before spring break! Professor Yamashita's talk sure was meaningful, wasn't it? I'll bet many of you are anxious to read his book now!

I just now read the last comments some of you posted before class. Wow! Andrew described a "a domino effect" of deprivation and crime after the war. I thought that was very keen. And Shiho reminded us of how hard it would be to stick up for someone like Mr. Seiji when everyone else was shunning him. Very brave, indeed! Angela made some excellent points about street kids, and I echo her endorsement of the work of Nancy Scheper-Hughes (on "small wars" against kids). Caitlin was right on target with her description of how the kids had no other choices available to them. So many great comments ... as always!

Even though it takes place in 1945, Barefoot Gen was written and published in the 1970s. We're moving up to the year 1980 after the break. I'll make a more substantive post soon, but for now, maybe you can consider (as you read) how Coin Locker Babies might have been influenced by 1970s manga (such as Drifting Classroom and perhaps other manga and anime (animated films) from the 1970s. Those of you who are familiar with a lot of manga and anime produced prior to 1980 might have some ideas. You might think of other kinds of comparisons too.

Room Change

2007-03-09T10:00:00.000-06:00

Samuel Yamashita will be speaking in room 313 PH from 5-6:30. 218 has a noise problem, so they switched rooms for us. We'll go back to our regular classroom afterwards or just stay in 313 if it's no trouble for the custodians. If you don't see this in time, there will be a note on 218.

See you later today!!

Support your library and get free pizza!

2007-03-07T18:02:00.000-06:00

Does that sound too good to be true? Well, it's not if you are an undergrad. I just received the following message.

Adrienne,

Last semester you may remember completing a survey about the UI Libraries. We received lots of great data from this project, but we want some more focused information from our largest library user group: undergraduate students.

We have organized a series of focus group discussions for undergraduates in the Main Library during the two weeks after Spring Break:

Wednesday, March 21, Tuesday, March 27 or Thursday, March 29 from 5:30 - 7:00 p.m.
Thursday, March 22 or Tuesday, March 27 from 7:00 - 8:30 p.m.

I am contacting you, because Chiaki Sakai at the library suggested that you regularly work with undergraduates (teaching, advising, etc.). Can you make an announcement in your undergraduate classes about these sessions?

Students can sign-up online for the session that best matches their schedule at www.lib.uiowa.edu/events/students. Besides helping the UI Libraries make changes and improvements, student participants also get dinner (pizza) on us.

Let me know if you have any questions. Thank you for your support of the Libraries.

Kristi Bontrager
Coordinator, Public Relations
University of Iowa Libraries

Samuel Yamashita

2007-03-05T00:09:00.000-06:00

Don't forget that we'll meet from 5:00 - 6:30 pm in 218 Phillips Hall. At 6:30, we'll take a short break and then reconvene in our usual classroom. I think it's going to be great for us to hear him read from the wartime diaries after our last class.

If you'd like to get a sense of what he's like and learn more about his new book, you can listen to this interview.

Click here for a review of the book with excerpts and here for a short article on the book's release.

ABCC, Mr. Seiji, and street kids

2007-03-04T15:42:00.000-06:00

What was the ABCC? What did they do? What didn't they do? I'm sure Shiori will have a lot to say about this.

What did you think of the story of "Mr. Seiji" in Volume 3?

How does Barefoot Gen depict the situation facing street kids, orphans, and so-called "juvenile delinquents" after the war?

Below are some images for you to discuss too. The last is by the internationally acclaimed photographer Tomatsu Shomei.

Warning: This video may be very difficult to watch.

2007-03-01T23:25:00.000-06:00

Here is the bomb sequence from the animated film version of Barefoot Gen.

March 9th!

2007-03-01T20:10:00.000-06:00

This semester, we will have two special guests. The first, Professor Samuel Yamashita, will be here next week! He'll be giving us a lecture entitled " Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese." We are reading Barefoot Gen and will be thinking about "ordinary Japanese" affected by war a lot this week and next, and Prof. Yamashita will provide us with the opportunity to learn even more! Samuel Yamashita is the Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History at Pomona College. His new book Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies is the first English translation of personal diaries kept by ordinary Japanese during World War II. He studied 75 diaries and selected 8 for inclusion in the book.

Also, a very important change to our usual plan for NEXT Friday, March 9th, will be our class location. We'll meet from 5:00 - 6:30 pm in 218 Phillips Hall. At 6:30, we'll take a short break and then reconvene in our usual classroom. Other people want to attend Prof. Yamashita's talk, so we need a larger room!

Excused absences given for anyone who attends the following events in Chicago and tells us about them!

2007-02-27T00:33:00.000-06:00

(Click on the image to see a larger version.)

Barefoot Gen

2007-02-26T20:39:00.000-06:00

As we begin our two-week encounter with Nakazawa Keiji's Barefoot Gen series, there are some things I want you to keep in mind. As many of you are already noticing, there are lots of things we know now that Nakazawa didn't know when he wrote the manga in the early 1970s. We know now, for example, a lot about the end of the war and the decisions involved in dropping the bombs that almost no one knew in the 1970s. We will discuss these issues in class, but you are welcome to start commenting on them below.

Nakazawa (pictured here) was born just a few years after Ôe in 1939 and wrote the texts you are reading in his early 30s. The two writers obviously had very different childhoods, but they were both deeply affected by the end of the war. As some of you know, Ôe has made common cause with the survivors of the bombings and written about his experiences with them. His writings on the subject are very different from the text we are now reading. You can read an interview with Nakazawa here if you'd like. In the interview, he says, "The government probably doesn't want to risk encouraging anti-American sentiment. But the facts are the facts. People should be told what happened."

Last semester, many of you had the opportunity to meet the four atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) who visited the UI campus and shared their stories with us. Some of you also saw the documentary Radiation: Hibakusha at the End of the World by Kamanaka Hitomi. In other classes, some of you have studied other hibakusha testimonies, seen footage of the aftermath, and studied the Manhattan Project documents. You will have an opportunity to share what you've learned in class, but feel free to make comments below too.

Here is a picture I took of Shiori and our Japan Studies librarian Chiaki Sakai with the survivors (Mr. Murata, Ms. Kayashige, Ms. Yano, and Mr. Kawasaki). I am sure Shiori, who was able to spend a whole week with them, will have quite a bit to share with us all.

When you read Barefoot Gen, think about whether the genre (comics) has an impact on how you feel about this story.

Roughly the same age as Ôe and Nakazawa is Umezu Kazuo, the "godfather" of horror comics in Japan. His series 漂流教室 Hyōryū Kyōshitsu ("The Drifting Classroom") has been very popular (made into movies, etc.). It was published about the same time as Barefoot Gen, and you might think they even look similar in style. The picture on the left comes from Hyōryū Kyōshitsu. But one is based on the actual bombing of Hiroshima, and the other is sci-fi horror fantasy. (I can tell you the story in class; it has some relationship to the bombings too, but in a very different way.) What do you think about what the genre does to the content? Maybe those of you who have heard the survivors and read other survivor testimony can tell us all if it's different reading the manga. Is it harder? Is it more emotionally difficult? Or is it more distancing? Are you affected more or less emotionally? Why or why not?

I also want to reiterate my commitment to working out alternative reading plans with anyone who would prefer not to engage representational violence. As we move closer and closer to the present, the representational violence (particularly sexual violence) will get more and more potentially upsetting, disruptive, or objectionable. This is especially true of Gold Rush and Coin Locker Babies. No one will be compelled to read anything s/he doesn't want to read, and, as I said before, we must not assume anything as to the reasons why anyone might opt out of any particular reading.

He may not respond to the iron fist with which I rule the class, but ...

2007-02-23T20:42:00.000-06:00

Happy Birthday to "Rikard," who turns 23 this Sunday and will be leaving us at the end of the semester to work in Tokyo!

Extra Credit Opportunity

2007-02-21T13:40:00.000-06:00

This Friday, Prof. Sonia Ryang of the UI will be giving a public lecture at noon! You can earn extra credit by attending and writing a short (1-2 page) response paper. Please don't summarize the talk. Write about YOUR responses to the talk. This is a good opportunity for those of you who didn't make posts last week. Here are the details:

Friday, February 23, 2007
Brownbag Seminar: "Gender, Self, Diaspora: Autobiographic Writings of Korean Women in Japan and the US." by Prof. Sonia Ryang, UI Dept. of Anthropology
12:00 Noon
302 Schaeffer Hall

Awards Ceremony

2007-02-20T23:42:00.000-06:00

I was just thinking about what I would say if I were to award each of the writers we've encountered so far with a blue ribbon. In what kind of category would they each be #1?

I have my ideas. I'm sure you'll have yours as well.

Why don't you start off by telling me (and us) what you think each of them does the best? Sôseki gets the blue ribbon in ______, Takiji gets it in ______, Mishima is #1 at ______, and Ôe is the best ______.

Oe

2007-02-18T15:42:00.000-06:00

You'll want to check out the Nobel Page for Ôe, and if you're encountering him for the first time, you might also want to skim this intro. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (芽むしり仔撃ち) was published in 1958, a few years before Seventeen, which some of you have read. Ôe was born in 1935, when Mishima was 10. Confessions of a Mask was published in 1948. The English translation of Mishima's debut novel came out in 1958, which was the year Nip the Buds was published in Japanese. We might think of Ôe and Mishima as contemporaries, but their responses to postwar Japan were quite different. You might also think of both novels as excruciating, but, again, in very different ways. As you read our new novel, share your reflections and responses below.

Movie Reviews: Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters

2007-02-17T14:24:00.000-06:00

To those of you who watched the movie on Friday night:
Write a short review of the film we watched in the comments section below. Include at least two specific examples from the film in your review.
(That should be fun!)

A Post for "Team Mask" ("Movie Team," yours will be coming, but you've got to see the movie first, right?

2007-02-14T06:21:00.001-06:00

I am always humbled when I read Takiji’s writing. I’m humbled by his tremendous courage and his willingness to risk so much so that others might not suffer. His concern was for collective survival more than his own survival. When I think of the clarity of his prose, how straightforward it is in its indictment of the conditions Takiji saw as oppressive, I think, “Wow, he was so brave.” Well, Confessions of a Mask is also a text some people might think of as demonstrating a certain kind of courage and a certain kind of candor, but it’s really different, right? How so? Use some specific examples from the text to tell us what you think might be considered brave or forthright. Or, feel free to find examples that reveal a lack of courage or candor.

Alexander’s comment below got me thinking about this issue. I was struck by Alexander’s description of the text as “invasive.” I think that’s really interesting, especially since Confessions of a Mask seems, on the surface, to be stuck in Mishima’s protagonist’s subjectivity. I know I have tended to see it (and the author himself) as self-absorbed, self-directed, and self-promoting. You wouldn’t think of self-absorbed writing as being invasive at first, but I think there is something really interesting and important in Alexander’s reaction that I’m hoping those of you on the “Mask Team” will explore. Terry gave us a great list of definitions of interiority. I think that word (and perhaps the word “control” too) could be very helpful as you think about Alexander’s reaction and your own.

I’m reminded of the old saying that we should “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Takiji certainly wrote to comfort (and inspire) the disturbed, those whose struggle to survive was fraught with material challenges. And we could say he was also writing to disturb the comfortable, the ruling elite, the capitalists, the oppressors. What about Mishima? What kinds of disturbing and comforting do you find in his novel?

Those of you familiar with the I-novel tradition can go crazy with this one: what is autobiographical fiction?

Wanna know something kind of interesting? Mishima’s first prospective partner for an arranged marriage was the woman who is currently Empress Michiko of Japan. Line that up with the way he describes his protagonist’s family background at the beginning of the novel and tell me what you think.

Choose Your Own Adventure?

2007-02-12T20:40:00.000-06:00

Since we've got two options this week, I thought I ought to make a post with two options.

Questions for the Confessions of a Mask Team

If a friend (not in our class) asked you what this novel was about, what would your answer be?

Is the concept of "interiority" important to this novel? How so?

What is Mishima's understanding of class?

What is "true pain" for Mishima? What kind of suffering matters to him? (You'll want to finish the novel before you tackle this one.)

What's up with the death and violence in this novel?

Questions for the Movie Team

Check out these articles, and leave your comments below.

"Manga oozes lustfully on to stage"

Mishima's suicide letter released

Mishima's letters to Fukushima Jirô

Mishima on film

2007-02-10T14:02:00.000-06:00

I especially would like those of you who were able to hear and meet the hibakusha last semester to comment on what Mishima says in the 1969 interview (in English) above. And what do you think Takiji would have thought of this?

If you can understand Japanese, you'll want to watch the following news footage and video of his "debate" with the Zenkyôtô (全共闘) movement student activists too.

The first two decades

2007-02-09T22:18:00.000-06:00

Some quick perspective: Our class is covering the period from 1906 to 2006. We're just 20 years into that journey so far. To give you a sense of how that breaks down in terms of our authors' ages, here's a little bit of trivia:

Sôseki was 36 when Takiji was born.

Sôseki was 39 when he wrote Botchan.

Takiji was 22 when Mishima was born. Sôseki had been dead for 9 years.

Takiji was 26 when he wrote The Factory Ship (which he wrote AFTER March 15, 1928 - I'd meant to share something about that with you tonight, but forgot in all the excitement).

Mishima was 8 when Takiji was killed at the age of 29.

Remember March 15th!

2007-02-07T19:42:00.000-06:00

By now, I'm guessing many of you have finished reading our story for this week. Some of you will have, over the past year, read 3 works by Takiji, and all of us will have read at least 2 by Friday. I'm struck by own changing responses. Last semester, I was so certain that "Comrade Taguchi's Sorrow" was my very favorite work by Takiji, but upon reading The Factory Ship again, I thought, "Oh! This one is my favorite after all." And now, here I am thinking this week's novel is my favorite (even though I'd told several of you otherwise last week.) Perhaps this has something to do with Takiji's seriousness of purpose and the urgency in his stories. I'll be interested to what you all think.

Those of you who read Japanese might be fascinated to see this blog.

And since your responses to the photos last week were so neat, I am posting these Images of Otaru.

This is a monument to Takiji in Otaru.

Look what I just found!

2007-02-05T05:28:00.000-06:00

"The Epistemology of Torture: 24 and Japanese Proletarian Literature" by Heather Bowen-Struyk!

(For those of you who got to meet Norma Field last semester, Heather Bowen-Struyk is one of her students.)

Wow!!

2007-02-02T22:21:00.000-06:00

I am really impressed with your recent blog comments! From the get-go, you all have been doing great, and I'm delighted! I just re-read your earlier comments on Takiji and think they are worth multiple readings!

Tonight we watched the film If You Were Young: Rage(君が若者なら), which was directed by Fukasaku Kinji (1970).

We'll spend the entire time next week discussing both stories. In the meantime, I thought you might want a place to share your reactions to tonight's film. How does it compare to The Factory Ship? Is it more or less hopeful? I'd like to see you all write about how Ryûji (the boxer) dies, how women are depicted in the film, and how the young men in the film compare to the men on the factory ship. Where were the young men from? What is significant about that? And what do you make of the truck? It seems to be a very heavy-handed symbol, but for what? (I had a student once say the truck is the main character in the film. What do you think of that?)

Some images from the sea of Okhotsk & Kamchatka and a stamp

2007-01-31T14:31:00.000-06:00

Click on any of the images below to see a larger version. The stamp features Takiji and the work we are reading this week and was issued in 2000.

Scholarship Info!

2007-01-29T17:15:00.000-06:00

The Stanley Summer Scholarship application is now available to be picked up from 111 Phillips Hall at the front desk. This isn't the same scholarship as the Stanley scholarship administered by International Programs. This scholarship is for Asian language study over the summer. Awardees will get between $2,000 and $2,500 for use in either the US or abroad for participation in a "recognized summer language program." Consideration is limited to students who intend to return to The University of Iowa for further study either upon completion of their summer work or after a limited time in a formal study-abroad program following the summer award period. The deadline is March 2.

Names, Part II

2007-01-29T09:56:00.000-06:00

Which characters in The Factory Ship have names? What's up with that?

Why we write

2007-01-28T11:51:00.000-06:00

There are lots of different reasons why people write fiction. At the end of our last class, I asked you to think about that. Sôseki and Takiji wrote for different reasons, and we can discern some of those reasons just from the works we are studying together. It goes without saying, I suppose, that why we write affects what we write.

Kobayashi Takiji was a proletarian writer. What does that mean? Have you ever heard the term before?

As I mentioned in class, at the age of 29 (in 1933), he was tortured to death by the Japanese military police. This is the photo I showed you in class and the one used for inspiration for the manga intro below. One of my students (in a class a year and a half ago) described this as "the most haunting image" he had ever seen.

When Professor Norma Field of the University of Chicago was here last semester, she talked to my classes about Takiji. Among the many things she shared that I will never forget was the story of how the following photos were removed from one of the only places where they could be seen. She is writing about the circumstances behind that decision for an upcoming book, but we can talk about it in class too.

I was familiar with the photo above, but I had never seen these photos before her visit.

Norma Field also told us that the police used torture techniques that Takiji had described in his novel March 15, 1928 when they murdered him. After The Factory Ship, we will read Justin Jesty's unpublished translation of that novel (for an anthology of Takiji's fiction that will hopefully be available soon). I have not been able to stop thinking about these images, about the young man so filled with a desire to make the world better that he was willing to risk so much. I'll want you all to think about his murder as you read. What is so dangerous about what he wrote? Why did he write what he did? Why did he write it the way he did?

We now have an excellent documentary in the UI library. Unfortunately, it's not subtitled, but if you want to watch it in Japanese, it's 『時代を撃て・多喜二』 (22619 VHS) in Media Services in the Main Library!

A little note

2007-01-27T01:58:00.000-06:00

I just wanted to make one important point explicit. We'll be reading a lot of different works, all of which I think are important for different reasons. I like some, and I don't like others. You'll feel the same way. And we all won't like the same things. That is totally okay. In fact, that's part of the fun. Some of our best class sessions could happen when we all have strong feelings that are different. By sharing our different interpretations, we'll all have the chance to deepen our understandings and maybe even amend our readings. My hope is that each time we get together in class, we'll all see the texts in new ways. I know that my own feelings about Botchan changed during your performances. I laughed at some things in new ways and found humor in places I hadn't before. You all know that I like our next writer, but that doesn't mean you have to like him too ... or as much. There are also no "off-limits" reactions as long as we continue to be nice to one another.

The Factory Ship

2007-01-27T00:07:00.000-06:00

What a great class! You all were fabulous tonight, and I really am excited! I laughed so hard at your wonderful stagings of the scenes from Botchan. I neglected to mention that I was very impressed with what you chose and how you did it. I know this is going to be a really special semester. Next week, I'll tell you a little bit about something very important that happened between the time when Botchan was written and the time when Takiji wrote The Factory Ship. It involves an alleged assassination plot and executions, as well as some stunning examples of courage and love.

In Japanese, the title of "The Factory Ship" is 蟹工船 (Kani Kôsen), which is really a crab-factory (or crab canning) ship. It's very different from the short story by Takiji that some of you read last semester ("Comrade Taguchi's Sorrow"), but you'll find in it, I think, some similar themes. For those of you who've never heard of Takiji, I'll bet you can still guess a lot as to how his life and his friends were different from Sôseki's just by reading what you've got. (I'll provide some more info via the blog in the coming days too.) Angela, Kristin, and Shiori have read some of Takiji's other writing (including "Comrade Taguchi's Sorrow") in Japanese (in a seminar last semester), so they can also share their thoughts on what it's like to read him in the original and in translation.

For now, I just want to share something neat. (Much heavier stuff to follow.) A new comic book (manga) called Manga kani kôsen was just released! The author is Fujiu Gô, but if you read Japanese, you might be interested in the work of Sano Chikara of the Shirakaba Literary Museum. He worked hard to get this manga made. You can see Shirakaba's Takiji Library here. (If you read Japanese, you'll find stuff there to read in the original.) Below are the first pages of this brand new and wonderful companion piece to the novel you are reading. Enjoy! To view a larger version, just click on any image below. It begins with Takiji's grieving comrades gathered around his corpse. They are in shock at the tragedy of his horrible murder. They know he couldn't have suffered a heart attack like the military police claimed. (He was, after all, an excellent swimmer with a strong heart.) This scene is used to introduce the story "The Factory Ship."

In the movies

2007-01-25T23:24:00.000-06:00

Yume juya was one of Sôseki's later works, written in 1908. It's made up of 10 "dream" episodes.

If you are interested, you can read the translation of one of those dreams here. (This isn't required reading.)

Yume juya is also now a film. You can see the trailer here. (No subtitles, but you'll get the idea.)

Botchan in the news!

2007-01-25T21:33:00.000-06:00

Click here to see.

Names

2007-01-23T18:48:00.000-06:00

Hi everyone,

You all sure jumped into the blog with lots of energy and great ideas! This bodes well for the semester. Keep it up!

It's not unusual for famous people to be referred to in special ways. Shakespeare doesn't need his first name to be mentioned for us to know who he was. Some famous painters or writers are known by just their last or first names. My other class is studying the Black Panther Party, and one of the co-founders is known by his first name, Huey. I can mention John and Yoko, and you'll know who I mean (probably), and I can mention Picasso or Da Vinci, and the effect is the same.

In the case of Japanese literature, some of the most famous (early) modern and premodern authors are known by their given names. So even though Natsume Sôseki's surname is Natsume, he's referred to as Sôseki. Sôseki was the pen name he chose for himself, so that could be one reason why he is referred to by that name even today. But Kobayashi Takiji is known as Takiji, and that was his real name, so the pattern is not fixed. Takiji was murdered when he was very young, which might have something to do with why he is, affectionately for some of us, referred to as Takiji. For those of you who've taken other classes with me, you'll know the same goes for Ichiyô, Bashô, Saikaku and others. Other writers are known by their surnames (or family names). Mishima and Ôe, for example, are known by their surnames, and so are some much earlier writers like Chikamatsu. (But Motoori Norinaga is referred to as Norinaga, so there's really no rule I can give you.) Sometimes people writing at more or less the same time and with more or less the same level of fame are referred to in different ways, but it does seem that by the 1930s, more and more writers were getting referred to by their surnames. And yet ... Yoshimoto Banana is referred to as Banana. But if you were named Mahoko and took the pen name Banana, people would probably call you Banana too.

I believe these are by the Turner to whom they refer.

2007-01-22T22:48:00.000-06:00

Maybe some of you who've taken European art history can verify and/or tell us more.

Keep up the discussion below! We'll have a lot to discuss on Friday!

Is Botchan funny?

2007-01-20T11:24:00.000-06:00

Even though our class is scheduled at a somewhat unusual time, I am confident we'll have a lot of fun this semester. It was great seeing some familiar faces and meeting those of you who haven't taken a course with me before.

The first question I'd like you to consider as you read Botchan is the one above in the post heading. Is this a funny story? What about it is funny? What isn't funny? Why?

I'd also like you to consider a question that has been of interest to some Japanese literary scholars as well: why is Kiyo so attached to Botchan? Tomatsu Izumi, for example, wrote a short essay (1998 AERA MOOK 『漱石がわかる』：「清はなぜ＜坊ちゃん＞に肩入れするのか」) in which she explores what some people see as the central relationship in the story, the one between Kiyo and Botchan. Maybe some of you are already thinking about this relationship. What do you think of Kiyo's devotion or commitment to Botchan? Tomatsu posits that the relationship between Kiyo and Botchan surpasses that of a servant and master. She suggests (among other things) that it's "not a relationship of sacrifice" so much as the "selfless" or "self-denying devotion" (無私の献身) of a mother for her child. What do you all think?

If your browser settings aren't configured to read Japanese, you will sometimes see some garbled characters in the posts. Don't worry. The Japanese is just there for folks who read or are studying Japanese, and you aren't missing anything that will affect your ability to succeed in this class.

Those of you who do read Japanese might get a kick out of this blog, and here is a picture of Red Shirt!

Botchan is described in our translation as a Tokyoite. The actual word in Japanese is Edokko (江戸っ子), which means "child of Edo." Edo is the old name for Tokyo, and the label implies a bit more than Tokyoite might suggest. As is the case with many big cities, not everyone who lives or lived in Tokyo is or was originally from there. An Edokko's family is or was an "old" Tokyo family. The label also connotes a certain personality type. Maybe Shiho and Shiori can tell us what they think of this word. We also have an Edokko here at the U of I! If you know Ishikawa-sensei, maybe you can ask him if he's an Edokko!

In case you wondered what kind of treats Kiyo bought for Botchan, here is a photo of a kintsuba 金鍔 sweet cake wrapped in a cherry leaf:

And here are some kôbaiyaki 紅梅焼:

夏目漱石

2007-01-18T23:33:00.000-06:00

Natsume Sôseki used to be the face of the 1,000 yen note in Japan until he was replaced by Noguchi Hideo, the guy who discovered the syphilis pathogen.

Sôseki is certainly one of the most studied modern Japanese authors, and his works are standards in core Japanese literature curriculum. Many of you had the chance to meet Norma Field last semester. She translated Sôseki's story And Then (Sore kara).

For some basic background information on Sôseki, click here.

For some interesting images related to our fist reading, click here.

If you'd like to see Botchan in the original, click here.

If you would like to read his famous novel Kokoro, click here.

If you read Japanese and would like to see something one of my old teachers has to say, click here.

Course Description and Class Calendar

2007-01-15T16:54:00.000-06:00

Major Authors in Japanese Literature:
Long Fiction (20th and 21st Century Novels)

This survey course of 20th and 21st century long Japanese prose and graphic prose narratives will introduce students to some major authors such as Kobayashi Takiji, Natsume Sôseki, and Ôe Kenzaburô. We will also study some significant literary movements and trends that have shaped the development of modern Japanese literature. For example, students will learn about the struggles of proletarian writers to “serve the people” through fiction in the 1920s and the pressures contemporary writers face from Japan’s publishers who demand regular output and manage literary prizes to promote sales. Throughout the semester, we will pay close attention to how and why various authors write, as well as how their personal and historical circumstances affect the content (and form) of the narratives they have produced. Each reading will afford students the opportunity to think about the assigned text in relation to its historical moment of production, its author, and its literary, social, and cultural merits.

All of the required texts except those by Kobayashi Takiji and Hoshino Tomoyuki are available for purchase at Prairie Lights Bookstore, which is located downtown at 15 South Dubuque St. Here's what you need to get:

Botchan by Natsume Sôseki (originally published in Japanese in 1906)
Note: Prairie Lights has a limited number of used copies of this text available. When they run out, they will direct you to the Iowa Bookstore on Clinton.

Confessions of a Mask by Mishima Yukio (originally published in Japanese in 1948)

Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids by Ôe Kenzaburo (originally published in Japanese in 1958)

Barefoot Gen, Volumes One Through Four by Nakazawa Keiji (originally serialized in Japanese in 1973)

Coin Locker Babies by Murakami Ryû (originally published in Japanese in 1980)

Amrita by Yoshimoto Banana (originally published in Japanese in 1994)

Gold Rush by Yu Miri (originally published in Japanese in 1998)

Class Calendar

January 19: Introduction

January 26: Natsume Sôseki: Botchan

February 2: Kobayashi Takiji: The Factory Ship

February 9: Kobayashi Takiji: March 15, 1928

February 16: Mishima Yukio: Confessions of a Mask

February 23: Ôe Kenzaburô: Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

March 2: Nakazawa Keiji: Barefoot Gen Volumes One and Two

March 9: Nakazawa Keiji: Barefoot Gen Volumes Three and Four

March 23: Murakami Ryû: Coin Locker Babies

March 30: Murakami Ryû: Coin Locker Babies

April 6: Yoshimoto Banana: Amrita

April 13 Yoshimoto Banana: Amrita

April 20: Yû Miri: Gold Rush

April 27: Hoshino Tomoyuki: Lonely Hearts Killer

May 4: Hoshino Tomoyuki: Lonely Hearts Killer

May 9: Final research papers due by 9 am.

New Blog and Course Coming Spring of 2007

2006-11-11T22:21:00.000-06:00

Last spring, I taught a course on Japanese short fiction, so this spring I decided to offer one on "long fiction" – novels and the like. All the readings will be in English, and no prior study of Japanese is required. If you stumble across this site before the course begins, here are few of the longer works we will read together in case you want to get a head start over the break.

Barefoot Gen, Volumes 1-4 by Nakazawa, Keiji

Coin Locker Babies by Murakami, Ryû