Japanese Contributions, 2009-2010

Japanese contributions to American literary studies for this period are quite impressive, with greater activity in 2009 than in 2010. As is well known about literary and cultural studies of countries other than one's own, the problem of translation holds a crucial key to the reception of writers and artists in scholarship and in the global market for their works. The publishing business in Japan, a self-styled "translation kingdom," flourishes on introducing foreign books and cultures in translation. It is some time now since Haruki Murakami's updated translations of The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby triggered a renewed interest in J. D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald. New translations of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow and Japanese editions of Vineland, Mason and Dixon, and Against the Day, all appearing in 2009-2010, have now invited scholars and general readers into the Pynchon world. Kohji Tokoh's The Making of Pseudo American Literature and Shunichiro Akikusa's Nabokov, Translation Is Mine are eloquent testimony to Japanese academic activity. Likewise, the current period offers important studies on individual 19th- and 20th-century American writers, significant collections of original essays on topics such as warfare, politics, media, and gender, and book-length studies on American culture. There are no noteworthy book-length studies on poetry or drama, although these areas are addressed in book chapters and articles in academic journals.

As usual, limited space forces this review to be selective, and priority goes to single-author books; the articles covered are restricted to those appearing in the major academic journals: Studies in English Literature (SELit), Studies in American Literature (SALit), and Journal of American Literature Society of Japan (JALSJ), the English-language version of SALit. Unless otherwise indicated, all books are published in Tokyo.

a. Literary History and Its Variations

Toshio Watanabe's three-volume literary history Lectures on American Literature for Japanese Scholars and Students (see AmLS 2008, p. 508) has been expanded with the publication of volume 4, Supplement (Kenkyu-Sha, 2010). It includes individual chapters on 23 additional American writers, most notably T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, and Allen Ginsberg, representing 20th-century American poetry, as well as Pearl S. Buck, Dashiell Hammett, F. Marion Crawford, Dawn Powell, and Norman Maclean. The final chapter, "100 Years of New York Times Book Review," surveying the vicissitudes of the reception of American writers, concludes Watanabe's literary history. The other significant literary history published in this period is Takaki Hiraishi's simply titled Amerika Bungaku-shi (Literary History of the United States) (Shohaku-sha). In contrast to Watanabe's more comprehensive project, Hiraishi's study (600 pages in one volume) is focused specifically on fiction; it is, as it were, his version of Richard Chase's "The American Novel and Its Tradition," with emphasis on the fates of the modern American self and of the American novel. Its five parts trace the historical development of the American narrative and its hero: "Tradition Established—The Root of the Modern Self," "The Flowering of the American Renaissance—Singing/Doubting the Modern Self," "The Development of Modern Fiction—The Modern Self Tested," "The Literature of Modernism—The Wavering Modern Self," "Postwar Literature—Creating a New Modern Self." There are no surprises in the novels and writers selected for examination, and Hiraishi's concern with the vicissitudes of the modern self that shape and create American literature is consistent throughout the entire volume. Importantly, this consistency extends to his treatment of women writers, whom he discusses on the same terms as their male counterparts and not as a minority group.

Amerika no Tabi no Bungaku: Wandah no Sekai wo Aruku (American Travel Literature: Journeying in the Land of Wonder), ed. Shunsuke Kamei (Showa-do), a collection of 15 essays contributed by nine young scholars, proposes a journey through American literary history by means of readings of American travel literature covering the colonial period and the American Renaissance and on to the present. The essays on Sarah Kemble Knight's "The Journal of Madam Knight," Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail, and Frederick Law Olmsted...