On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights in Japan by Judith Pascoe (review)

Judith Pascoe's On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights in Japan, is a fascinating, sometimes difficult book, but not because it is dense, dry, or obscure. It is accessibly and engagingly written. And, joining a growing body of scholarship on the transnational afterlives of the Victorians, it is also a timely meditation on the ways in which nineteenth-century texts travel to and are transformed by new cultural contexts. Pascoe's book is difficult, rather, because it lays bare the scholarly process. She remarks that "I set out to write about the Japanese Wuthering Heights. I ended up writing about the wayward tendencies of scholarly investigation and about the thwarting of a sincere endeavor. . . . I wound up writing about love, loss, and longing" (11). The book, then, is about Wuthering Heights (1847) in Japan, from its earliest translations in the 1930s, through its reintroduction in the 1950s with William Wyler's 1939 film, to later iterations in children's literature, novels, Takarazuka theater, and manga. More than this, however, it is a sometimes-confessional account of the author's journey in pursuit of that topic.

Pascoe's book is a blend of scholarly memoir, ethnographic case study, and literary analysis. In five chapters and a coda, she recounts her travels to Japan and her conversations there with various scholars, authors, translators, manga artists, and retired theater personalities whose experiences with Wuthering Heights she seeks to uncover. These encounters lead her to speculate on the novel's enduring appeal, particularly to Japanese girls and women. Catherine Earnshaw's famous declaration "I am Heathcliff!" serves as the linchpin of this speculation, both because, as Pascoe discusses in chapter 5, it is a translationally tricky line that does not convert easily to Japanese linguistic and social conventions (the use of gender-specific pronouns, the distaste for reliance on pronouns generally) and because it signals the relational act of imagining one's subjectivity through another's (Brontë qtd. in Pascoe 29). In a scene in chapter 3 in which she ruminates on the novel during a train ride while watching a badly behaved teenage girl who earns fellow passengers' disapproval, Pascoe considers that "Catherine might represent an escape hatch from societal norms for Japanese women readers, especially those of a certain age" (68). Describing a scene from Brontë's novel in which Catherine rails against her own social limitations, Pascoe recalls how such scenes feature prominently in the Japanese adaptations: "The female manga artists . . . highlighted the novel's love story, but also Catherine's emotional outbursts" (69). Thus, in the long-running shōjo manga Garasu no kamen, by Miuchi Suzue (one of Pascoe's interviewees), a defining moment for the heroine, Maya, occurs when she performs Catherine in a stage production of Wuthering Heights. Maya's decision to play a character so "passionate, obstinate, headstrong, and wild" is a bold act of self-assertion (Miuchi qtd. in Pascoe 63). Alongside her ethnographic pursuit of readers' experiences, Pascoe offers nuanced readings of Brontë's novel and its Japanese progeny.

Interwoven with these treatments of the novel, its afterlives, and its readers, Pascoe describes her struggles to learn Japanese so that she can do justice to her topic. Even in the textual exegesis, Pascoe underscores the labor involved in the project: "I balanced my dictionary on a pillow, turned to the second half of Garasu no kamen volume 7, in which Kitajima Maya prepares to play Catherine in Wuthering Heights" (62). Wuthering Heights becomes a metaphor for her undertaking: "'I'm Lockwood,' I thought to myself. Brontë's frame story suddenly stood revealed as the history of a person who tries to gain entrance into a foreign country, and who is baffled at every turn. . . . In the past I'd judged Lockwood to be a loathsome character, but now I felt some sympathy for his awkwardness" (30). Pascoe by no means...