Jeffrey Angles

Seeking the Strange: Ryōki and the Navigation of Normality in Interwar Japan

PEOPLE often describe the popular culture of Taishô and the first decade of Shôwa as exhibiting a fascination with ero, guro, nansensu (eroticism, grotesquerie, and nonsense).1 One sees reflections of this fascination in virtually every arena of popular culture, including literature. Throughout the Taishô and early Shôwa periods, readers were captivated by stories about the bizarre, ridiculous, irrational, or fashionably odd, and if there was an extra dimension of eroticism, then all the better. Some of the best-known authors of interwar Japan, including the now-canonical writers Tanizaki Jun’ichirô (1886–1965), Akutagawa Ryûnosuke (1892–

These Things Here and Now: Poetry in the Wake of 3/11

Perhaps the segment of the Japanese literary world where the seismic forces of 3/11 were felt most strongly, however, was the poetic world. Many Japanese newspapers include regular columns that include free verse, tanka or haiku poems, but in just the few days after 3/11, poetry began to emerge from those small columns and take a more prominent place in the news, eventually finding its way into a central position in the discourse that had started unfolding across the nation. At the same time that it shook poetry into the public eye, the earthquake levelled, at least temporarily, the hierarchical culture that had tended to keep established poets and relative newcomers apart. The collapse of the usual hierarchical distinctions, genre differences and personal rivalries resulted in an enormous burst of poetic output, special magazine issues, books, poetry readings, musical collaborations and translations. Keywords: earthquake; hierarchical culture; Japan; poetry; tsunami

Translation Within the Polyglossic Linguistic System of Early Meiji-Period Japan

During the mid- to late nineteenth century, Japan’s linguistic situation was complicated. There were multiple writing styles and literary authors would select from them based on genre and subject matter. Among the “high” literary styles used by educated people was one called kanbun yomikudashibun-chō (漢文読み下し文調), a style that had developed in imitation of the Japanese adaptations of Classical Chinese texts. This chapter examines the stylistic choices faced by translators as they completed some of the first important literary translations from European languages in the midst of this complicated linguistic system. As case studies, this chapter examines two famous translations dating from 1878: the translation of Jules Verne (1828–1905) by Kawashima Chūnosuke (1853–1938) and the translation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) by Niwa Jun’ichirō (1851–1919). Although both were published in the same year, they reveal radically different translation strategies and a profoundly different attitude toward the use of language.

Dr. Seuss goes to Japan: ideology and the translation of an American icon

Abstract: This article examines the history of the translation into Japanese of perhaps the most quintessentially American childrens author – Theodor Geisel or ‘Dr. Seuss’. As this article argues, there have been several waves of translation, but at all times larger ideological currents have played a big role in determining which books were translated and how. This article pays attention to the ways that the choice of text and translation style reflect larger ideas at work within society. For instance, the Japanese version of The 500 hats of Bartholemew Cubbins, translated by Ōmori Takeo in 1949, was published during the postwar SCAP Occupation, an era in which Dr. Seuss’ liberal, anti-imperialist story held special resonance for the Japanese population. Later, during the 1970s, the prominent translator Watanabe Shigeo translated a dozen Seuss works, but in ways that modify the messages in order to better match the zeitgeist of the era in which he was working. The newest translations have been spearheaded by the feminist poet Itō Hiromi, who has translated Seuss in ways that decenter and destabilize the male privilege implied in the original texts, thus carrying his liberal agenda in a new direction appropriate for our contemporary moment.

Queer nonsense: aestheticized homoeroticism in Inagaki Taruho's early stories

Abstract This article examines representations of schoolboy homoerotic desire in mid-1920s essays and short stories by modernist author Inagaki Taruho (1900–77) and argues that they should be read in the context of the concurrent proliferation of nansensu bungaku (nonsense literature), especially light, accessible stories that celebrate chance happenings, fashions, surfaces and fleeting impressions. Taruho uses a strategy of ‘nansensu’ in order to create a new celebratory form of queer literature that associates male homoeroticism with aesthetic acuity, modernity and what he called ‘the new arts’. At the same time, Taruho strenuously avoids the negative rhetoric that had become a significant part of representations of same-sex desire in the literature of the early Shōwa period. By drawing on particular examples from several essays and stories, including ‘Watashi no tanbishugi’ (My aestheticism, 1924), ‘Hana megane’ (Pince-nez glasses, 1924), ‘R-chan to S no hanashi’ (The story of R-chan and S, 1924), ‘Kāru to shiroi dentō’ (Karl and the white light, 1924) and ‘Tsukehige’ (False moustache, 1927), this paper demonstrates that Taruho was actively resisting and subverting the language and assumptions of sexology.