Recent Activity

For the past few days I've been reading the material that I've acquired, (and there's quite a lot of it). Right now I'm kind of drifting from book to book, reading whatever catches my interest. I've read about halfway through "The Dancing Girl of Izu, and Other Short Stories" by Yasunari Kawabata. I'm also reading "I am a Cat," by Natsume Soseki.

I've come to the conclusion that it will be necessary to learn Japanese to truly study Japanese literature. Regardless of how talented the writers are, much of the personality in their words is robbed from them in the process of translation. The exception to this is the translations of Murakami, because he's new, and his scholars have exercised the utmost care in preserving his original writing. There is a quote in a book I read: "Art is not the what, it's the how." So how a writer says things is as important as what they say. With this principle in mind, it is clear that one must learn a language to understand the authors who write in that language. I have found it very hard to focus on some of the material I'm reading, because the style invariably falls into the category of insufferably generic.