Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity ReviewWhew. You might feel like you've actually climbed Mount Fuji after reading this book. It is an extremely dense exercise in literary criticism, written by Dennis Washburn primarily (or so it seems) for the appreciation, edification, and enjoyment of his peers, i.e. other professors of Japanese literature. Very little about this book is user-friendly, and it probably takes itself a little too seriously. And whole paragraphs are loaded down with rather turgid abstractions about identity, ideology, authenticity, modernity, and other boogaboos that keep folks in academia awake at night.
Still, for all that, there's much that's of interest in these chapters. I'm a bit biased, of course, for Washburn discusses some of my favorite authors (Ueda Akinari and Natsume Soseki) as well as ones I follow regularly (Mori Ogai and Yokomitsu Riichi), along with one I'm not so familiar with (Ooka Shohei) and one I generally love to hate (Mishima Yukio). He even gets a word in edgewise about Murakami Haruki in the epilogue, which is all fine and well, if a bit rushed and sudden--like he's changing the subject rather than bringing the book to a satisfying conclusion. The parts in each chapter where Washburn analyzes the specific novels of these particular writers in detail are more or less full of intriguing and convincing analysis--these were the meaty bits, as far as I was concerned. As a whole, though, the book doesn't cohere quite so well, giving the sense of a bunch of good independent articles rather sloppily wielded together with vague invocations of common themes and issues tacked on after the fact--at least that was my impression, though I'll admit it's quite possible that I just didn't "get it" upon a single read-through. Often the intended referents in the abstract bits framing each chapter remained fuzzy and unclear to me, and the relation to the chapter's main focus tenuous or else abrupt though never, I must say, completely arbitrary. As a nitpick, too, it seems that any book that hopes to address issues of cultural identity and its political and ethical reverberations should probably include some mention of Kawabata Yasunari at least if not Tanizaki Jun'ichiro as well ("In Praise of Shadows" especially)--no book can include everything, of course, but these seem like glaring omissions for any adequate consideration of the subject at hand. But so it goes; perhaps they were too "obvious" to be included.
In any case, "Translating Mount Fuji" is alternately fascinating and frustrating if consistently heavy-going and just a tad overwrought, but overall it's well worth wading through if you are seriously studying modern Japanese literature.Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity Overview

Want to learn more information about Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now