Dennis Washburn

Another’s Speech in Another’s Language: Translation as Possession

For readers whomay not be familiar with it, The Tale of Genji [Genjimonogatari] is a novel that has occupied a dominant position in the history of Japanese culture for almost exactly 1,000 years. Its canonical status, however, is not based solely on its intrinsic literary merits but on the ways it has been read, misread, and appropriated for other purposes. The Tale of Genji has been rewritten through medieval fan fiction, fake chapters, Buddhist religious rituals, visual narratives of all sorts, product placement, erotic parodies, nationalist philological treatises, and picture books produced for the trousseaus of middle-class brides. These “translations” not only confirm the work’s canonical status by showing its ability to sustain multiple interpretations over time but have also become—in a very real sense—a part of Murasaki Shikibu’s text. As I spent the better part of fifteen years struggling to replicate in English some form of the parochial literary qualities of the Genji, my awareness of the derivative, possessive nature of the act of translating guided my approach to the text. Because I did not set out with an overall conception of how to render the original into English, I began with an extremely literal version, revising numerous times. As a result, my understanding of the work and the justification for pursuing this project evolved. Since literary art comes into being only at themoment of engagement between reader and text, and since every such engagement is different, there can never be a final, definitive reading. All translators are readers first and foremost, and so in the end, the main justification I can offer in good faith for this new version is a paradoxical, ambivalent one. I have undertaken this work precisely because there can be no such thing as a definitive translation. It is delusional to imagine that a translation can somehow completely capture in one language a text written in a different one, for a text possesses the reader as much as a reader/translator possesses a text. Moreover, there are always elements of a text that defy translation. For example, in the case of the Genji, how does one replicate in printed romanized script the beauty of the calligraphy, the ink, and the paper that were all material to the experience of reading Murasaki Shikibu’s narrative when it was first composed?

文学 Bungaku/Literature

文学 / Bungaku / Literature Dennis Washburn Since the late nineteenth century bungaku has come to refer primarily to ―literature‖ in the sense roughly equivalent to contemporary English usage—that is (to paraphrase the definition in Webster‘s New World Dictionary), to writing of a creative or imaginative character that is distinct from historical narratives, scientific writings, and news reporting, that implies a notion of cultural value, or that suggests writing defined by period or national origin. 1 This particular definition of bungaku, which was fixed more than a century ago and has changed little over that span of time, is readily apparent in a large number of common phrases that, taken together, provide an outline history of modern Japanese literature: kokubungaku (national literature); Nihon bungaku (Japanese literature); kindai bungaku (modern literature); gendai bungaku (contemporary literature); taishū bungaku (popular literature); junbungaku (pure literature); puroretaria bungaku (proletarian literature); seisan bungaku (productivity literature); nōmin bungaku (rural or peasant literature); dōwa bungaku (children‘s literature); joryū bungaku (women‘s literature); posutomodan bungaku (postmodern literature). A more recent usage has arisen in the phrase conpyūtaa bungaku (computer-generated literature), which in turn has given rise to an intriguing complementary phrase, ningen bungaku (human literature). In all of these examples the meaning of bungaku is so fundamental, so obvious Webster‘s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, Cleveland: William Collins and World Publishing Co., 1976, 826. Similar definitions are found in the OED and the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. See the following links: www.oxfordreference.com/views/SEARCH_RESULTS.html?y=0q and www.bartleby.com/61/96/L0.html

Being and "Doing" (1958)

Those Who Fall Asleep Over Their Rights Back when I was a student, I attended a lecture by Professor Suehiro Gentarō on “prescription” in the civil code, and I recall him explaining the provision as follows. If a corrupt borrower takes advantage of his lender’s failure to demand repayment within a set period of time and shamelessly pockets the money, he benefits, while the timid, good-natured lender ultimately loses his claim to that money. This outcome struck me as terribly harsh and unfair when I first heard it, but underlying this legal provision is the assumption that those who fall asleep over their rights and do nothing over time to assert or protect their claims do not consider the civil code worth upholding. While I ultimately came to see the reasoning that underpins the provision as reasonable, it was the phrase “those who fall asleep over their rights” that left a strangely powerful, lasting impression. If a person does not assert his or her rights before the statute of limitations lapses,1 if a person is simply content with being the creditor and takes no action to ensure repayment, then, according to the logic behind the legal practice of prescription, that creditor will ultimately lose his or her claim. When I think about that logic now, I am struck by the extremely important principle that it implies–a principle that extends well beyond a single provision in the civil code. To explain what I mean, let us turn to Article 12 of the Japanese Constitution, where the following phrase appears: “The freedom and rights secured by this Constitution must be preserved by the constant efforts of the People.” This statement not only “Being” and “Doing” (1958) Maruyama Masao

おたく Otaku/Geek

The English words closest in meaning to otaku are “nerd” and “geek.” The character type denoted by otaku is found in many nations and cultures, even though not every language has a precise name for it, and the common image the word brings to mind—an unattractive male obsessed with technology—can be traced back as far as Hephaestus, the ugly, crippled blacksmith-god of fire and the forge in Greek mythology. This universal type of course exists in Japan as well, but a number of unique factors during the 1980s— cultural structures, social conditions, educational institutions—were responsible for the coining of the derisive term otaku. The contemporary usage of the word otaku originates in an essay titled “A Study of Otaku” (Otaku no kenkyū) that appeared in the June 1983 edition of Manga burikko (Cutie Pie Comics), an erotic manga magazine. Nakamori Akio, who was just starting out at the time, wrote the essay, which barely fills more than two pages in a light Shōwa style that vividly depicts the otaku type.1

Working Words: New Approaches to Japanese Studies

Author(s): Sand, Jordan; Tansman, Alan; Washburn, Dennis | Abstract: Working Words: New Approaches to Japanese Studies

A Page of Madness: Cinema and Modernity in 1920s Japan (review)

ing with the recent general trend in the academy toward interdisciplinarity and should be of importance and interest to a wide range of Japan specialists. With its emphasis on novel crossmedia experimentation and interarts collaboration—in my opinion its most exciting aspect—Havens’s book is sure to be a catalyst to scholarly conversation, and perhaps even innovative collaboration, across disciplines. Should it encourage the rest of us to rethink the boundaries and assumptions that have come to shape our own fi elds and scholarly projects, and to glimpse new potentials therein, its contribution will indeed be fruitful and lasting.

Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History (review)

Time Frames is an ambitious, complex, and occasionally quirky study. The author, Scott Nygren, presents both a historical overview of the Japanese fi lm industry that privileges its position within a global, multimedia cultural matrix and a metahistory of the discipline of Japanese cinema studies (and, more generally, of the fi eld of cultural studies) that challenges the very possibility of capturing or containing the multifarious aspects of the subject within a unitary, transcendent narrative. Nygren shows a respectful attitude toward earlier histories of the industry (especially the groundbreaking archival work of Donald Richie and Joseph L. Anderson), but his study is as much about the ways history is constructed as it is about the history of a particular cultural artifact. As such, questions concerning the possibilities and limitations of writing history in an age dominated by poststructuralist methodologies and marked by an acceleration of the convergence of media and cultures have shaped the conception of Time Frames. Nygren’s approach is, on one level, a narrativist historicism describing the discursive fi elds and practices that have helped determine the creation and reception of Japanese cinema as an object of study. The book, however, tries to do more than provide a neutral account of discursive formation by examining the ethical aims of this form of historicism.

Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature (review)

the Ise selection (pp. 27–28) or in the dating of a China mission as 936 rather than 836 (p. 164) or perhaps in misleadingly labeling the ladies-in-waiting at court “courtesans” (p. 19). Nonetheless, Mostow continues to push the envelope, advocating revisionist reexaminations that necessarily must take into account history, ideology, and cultural nationalist agendas, for literature and the arts are rarely if ever “politically disengaged.”

The Shade of Blossoms

Ooka Shohei (1909-88) was a distinguished member of the Japanese literary establishment for more than four decades following the end of the Pacific War. He was a prolific writer and active translator of French literature, most notably the novels of Stendahl. A protege of the influential critic Kobayashi Hideo (1902-83), Ooka secured his reputation with such works as the novel Fires on the Plain and the memoir Taken Captive: A Japanese POWs Story that recount his experiences as a soldier in the Philippines during World War II. While the war was the defining experience for Ooka, his work exhibits enormous range and depth. The Shade of Blossoms, for which he was honored in 1961 with both the Mainichi and the Shincho literary prizes, is a novel of manners, and certainly the setting of the novel, the demimonde of the Ginza bar scene in the 1950s, and its subject, the aging bar hostess Yoko, seem far removed from the universe of battle. Nonetheless, The Shade of Blossoms not only shares key elements of style but also extends in important ways the moral concerns of his earlier works. The Shade of Blossoms provides a disturbing view of lives at the margins of Japanese society. Ookas is a powerfully ethical literature that describes the inner search for meaning and identity in a world where received values have been disrupted by war or by social upheavals.