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  • A Perspective on Reading Dickinson in Japan
  • Yoko Shimazaki (bio)

In Japan we have an Emily Dickinson Society of Japan with a hundred or so members, including very active Dickinson scholars and enthusiastic readers. For them, or I should say for us, Dickinson's poems are inexhaustible, fascinating objects of reading and study. But after my fairly long experience of teaching Dickinson to Japanese college students, I cannot deny my impression that she will never be a popular poet among them, will never be understood really or loved and enjoyed fully by them, because even at the language level, reading her poetry seems to be just beyond the English ability of average Japanese college students. It is true that in our college there are a relatively large number of students who choose her for their graduation theses, but this is only because they think it safer, as I happen to be teaching there and can help them with their work.

I know that Dickinson is a difficult poet, even to the English speaking readers. What I want to do here is to point out two cultural differences that are regarded as obstacles for Japanese readers in reading Dickinson: first, the difference of sensibility toward poetry and second, the lack of Christian background, although these two are so closely connected that they might be discussed here as one.

Professor Inada, in his article, "Emily Dickinson and Japanese Sensibility," says:

The experience in Dickinson's poetic world most foreign to us is perhaps her faith in Christianity. So many of her poems are about her sincere faith [End Page 104] that we might even call her a religious poet, yet we are apt to generalize her joy, sorrow, wisdom and truth into an experience or a notion which is familiar to us or to interpret her religious images simply as metaphors.

(After a Hundred Years, 115)

What Professor Inada says here is also reflected in the following passage by Professor Kanaseki, who indirectly points out the lack of Christian vision in Japanese readers:

Is it really true that Japanese readers in general feel when they read The Scarlet Letter that the book is "interesting and valuable even as a book of today because it seeks after the answer to the everlasting question of the human soul?"

(Kanaseki, 10)

I wonder how many Japanese readers and even Japanese critics would say "Yes" to this question, when they are asked for their honest and most natural response to the book. Here I emphasize the phrase "most natural," because for most of the sophisticated readers the formal answer will be "Yes." However, I must say that many of them do not really think that way about the book.

Indeed, there must be a certain difference of sensibility between Western and Japanese readers toward works of literature. This is rather clearly explained by Makoto Ooka, a well-known critic and a poet, when he writes:

There is a kind of common notion among Japanese readers that for the Western poets, writing poetry and thinking about the universe are not two distinct actions, whereas in most cases, the vision of Japanese poets . . . hardly go beyond the outcome of the poet's personal emotions.

(Ooka, 194-195)

This means that usually the interest of Japanese poets is in pursuit of what is reflected upon their minds as imagery, rather than in exploring what exists objectively outside of their own closed microcosm.

On the other hand, according to Professor Niikura, Dickinson's poems are "hieroglyphic for a universal experience," and though her "vision is not religious, but a secular one . . . , yet [it is] apocalyptic because it is isolated from the world" (After a Hundred Years, 34).

Such consciousness of living in a dual world, a life with apocalyptic vision often seen in Dickinson's poetry even though the poet feels somewhat uneasy [End Page 105] about its nature, is utterly foreign to many Japanese readers. Thus Dickinson's difficulty for us is not that we cannot share her Christian faith; it is rather that we are not used to seeing the poetic universe with the same Christian vision as hers, which is basically cultivated in the soil of seventeenth...

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