On “The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature,” edited by Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt ****

This is the second volume of Chinese literature put out by Columbia University Press that I've read. The first was classic lit; this volume deals chiefly with the literature of the twentieth century. The shame in that is that when the two volumes are put together, the one to two hundred years in between get short shift. Like the previous volume, I was not a fan of the manner in which this volume was put together. As someone who knows little about Chinese literature and who is trying to learn more about it, I would have relished a bit more attention to context. Why these selections? And what do these selections say about the state of Chinese literature at the time? This volume, rather, is set up like a literary anthology in which the editors' voices are relatively muted; the “literature” you're reading is the important stuff, even if you know little about it. There are no headnotes. Instead, there is a set of short biographies placed at the start of the entire book, forcing a reader to go back and forth between the selections and the bios for info. The bios give good life info and sometimes a little info about the selection itself, but it's hard to glean, from the bios and the overall setup, why the editors chose some works or how relatively important the writer or the piece is to the overall body of modern Chinese literature. I found myself no longer checking the bios by about halfway through the volume, as they began to run together.

Intriguingly, the editors chose to provide the volume in three sections, with three subsections each. First, the anthology is split up by genre: Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction. Then, it is split up by period: pre-Mao (from 1918), Mao, and post-Mao. Personally, I would have preferred the genres not be split out, so that the work would have been wholly chronological, but I can see the value in the generic splits. The fiction section is the longest, taking up 5/7 of the overall text, with the poetry and nonfiction each taking up about a seventh. Initially, I would have thought the fiction—short stories, not chapters from longer novels—too long, but the editors choice here seems to be wise. It is the stories that are the strongest section of the book. The poetry, I found, though often full of profoundly beautiful imagery did not seem on par, as a whole, to the classic Chinese poetry of years before, the images often not evoking a parallel track of thought about life. The nonfiction was also not so inspiring or interesting to me. As such, the stories proved to be the section that most seemed to reflect the concerns of daily life for modern Chinese.

What is evident in the pre-Mao section stories is the poverty that must have dominated China before the coming of communism. Such helps explain why the revolution came about. One gets the sense in some tales, which present a more communistic view, of the hope some held out for revolutionaries. But mostly, one gets the feeling for the overall povery of the population. The Mao section of stories present only a few of idealism. That's because so much of the literature that the editors have chosen comes out of Taiwan. But there's probably good reason—idealistic stories of Maoist society do not generally make for interesting reading, except maybe the first one or two times. The Post-Mao world is surprisingly open about the failures and horrors of the Cultural Revolution—neighbors turning in/on neighbors to keep from being turned in themselves, no one truly guilty of anything outside a willingness to sell others out for alleged lack of loyalty to save one's own skin; old revolutionaries who have come to see the folly of their hopes; local party leaders who use their authority to perform heinous acts.

My two favorite pieces in the book stemmed from this post-Mao period. The first, “The Tunnel” by Chen Ruoxi, concerns a lonely older man whose adult children are devoted to the party and who are making their way up various government positions. This older man cannot be and is not allowed to have a love interest, since that would interfere with inheritance and potentially with the children's party status. During the course of the story and his service on one of the party committees helping to aid the community, he finds himself falling for a widow, whose husband had been accused of being against the party and had been taken away. The father finds various amusing ways to have small trysts with this woman, sneaking out, for example, to see movies with her. But the family will NOT allow him to remarry—it is simply shameful for an older man and would hurt his children's own economic needs. One day, the couple opts to skip the movie and go for a hike in some lesser known part of the city. They find a tunnel and some alone time. The ending here is heartbreaking, just as the man's experience of being denied love would have been.

The other story, and a very short one at that, that stood out to me was Liu Yichang's “Wrong Number,” not so much for its emotional connection as for its technical trickery. The tale is one told twice, once without the “wrong number” phone call and once with it, showing how a few minutes—a dead butfferfly, if you will, to use the old sci-fi trope—can change the course of one's life.

On "The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature" edited by Victor H. Mair ****

This concise volume of Chinese literature mostly dating to pre-1800 seems like a nice introduction to someone like me who is largely unfamiliar with Chinese literature outside of a few fundamental philosophical texts. Mair also aims to present lesser known contemporary translations, most of which seemed accessible and interesting.

That said, while I enjoyed the basic introduction, I found the book's layout and structure to be less than ideal. In terms of layout and design, the introductions to each of the individual pieces are set as footnotes rather than as headnotes, making for confusing reading. Sure, it's easy enough to figure out how the layout works after the first couple of entries, but the fact that the "headnotes" were set as footnotes means that on the few occassions where an introduction to a given reading is really long, the footnote runs across several pages; one then has to turn back several pages to begin the reading. The annotative footnotes can be useful and are appropriately set at the bottom of the page, though I found as I got deeper into the anthology that I read fewer and fewer of them, as many of them weren't essential for the understanding of the work and thus interrupted my enjoyment of the text; that said, as "optional" reading for further, they certainly are nice to have.

Another complaint I had with the general set-up was the choice to split the work up by genre. This, obviously, is the volume editor's choice, and it has some advantages, such as giving one a sense of the differing genres within Chinese literature as a whole. However, the editor doesn't really use the set-up to advantage because there are no general introductions to each genre outside of the extended footnotes at the start of a given reading. I would have preferred to have read the works in wholly chronological order, which would have given me more of a sense of the developing literary output over Chinese history, be it poetry, fiction, letters, drama, philosophy, criticism, prefaces, or whatever. The genre divisions were particularly frustrating when a given author wrote within several genres (some of which were related--lyric vs. poetry; poetry criticism vs. poetry; letter to another poet vs. poetry); thus, the book splits up his (and it generally is men who are the writers) various selections across hundreds of pages, with footnotes/headnotes referencing one back to some much earlier selection for a biography and more info. One doesn't get a feel for how a given author's criticism relates to his creative output or his work in another genre as a result. As such, I felt like I didn't really get as good a sense for Chinese literature as I might have.

Individual selections I found particularly interesting included the following.

I really enjoyed the passages from the Tao te ching that were selected, and I will gladly read this work in whole later in my study (in fact, I've already started).

I also really enjoyed much of the poetry that the editor selected. The poetry, in fact, is probably the only genre of traditional Chinese literature that I can say impressed me, as the rest seemed heavily folk oriented, pat, or too culturally centered to speak to a person thoroughly ensconsed in Western culture (one chapter is devoted to jokes, few of which made much sense to me, outside of the accompanying explanations, which of course made them less than funny). Of the poetry, I enjoyed, of course, the classic poets Li Po and Tu Fu. I also really liked the selections from the Book of Songs and hope to read more of that work down the road. What I came away with in regard to the poetry specifically was an understanding of how human feelings really cross time and space; many of the works seemed quite modern in terms of the issues the poets were dealing with, and yet the poems are often thousands of years old.

Li Shang-yin's Miscellany was a particularly interesting selection. Though not a poem in the anthology (it is in the genre Miscellany, because it is a list), the work is a set of lists on various topics that might as well be poetry, given how interesting most of the lists are--what is shameful, what is not to be despised, what is unlucky, and so on, more than forty lists in all.

In the novels section, I really enjoyed the passage from Ts'ao Hsueh-chin's Dream of Red Towers (more commonly known as Dream of the Red Chamber), which I'll likely given a full read of at a later time.

One nice thing about reading an anthology such as this is that I was able to read in a few genres, such as drama, that I'll likely not otherwise explore as I begin selecting invidual longer works to read. That's, of course, one reason I chose to read an anthology early on in my Chinese reading list and why I'll likely read the companion volume of modern Chinese literature sometime soon as well.

On "The Sagas of the Icelanders" ***

This anthology provides a taste of what Icelandic peoples were writing in the Middle Ages. Most of the sagas here were written down between 1200 and 1400, with the actual tales taking place around 900 to 1100, as Iceland moved from being heathen to Christian. This puts an interesting spin on many of the stories, as the authors sometimes find a need to put a good word in for Christianity, yet they do so largely without saying too much negative about the former ways: those before Christianity were heroes living large. Interestingly, their often murderous actions don't seem all that different after their conversion. Still, I can see why the Icelandics were viewed as perhaps the greatest poets of the era among the Scandinavian peoples. For such a small population, they put together a remarkably interesting body of work.

An interesting trait of all of the sagas is how they weave in history and genealogy. This weaving makes them seem like actual histories, while in fact, so the introduction notes, most of them were to a large extent fiction.

The longest of the sagas in the book is Egil's Saga. It recounts the heroic life of Egil Skallagrimson, but really, the tale starts several generations earlier, with a family in Norway and a man who remarries in old age. By this young wife, he has two children who, upon his death, are disinherited by the family of the first wife. This sets up much of the violence that follows--and the family's move to Iceland. On the death of the holder of the father's land, a man named Thorolf takes over, but the disinherited portion of the family is not given a portion of the land. Two members of this family take positions in the king's court thereafter and spread vicious rumors about Thorolf. Though loyal to the king to the nth degree (paying great amounts of tribute on various raids that he goes on), Thorolf falls into disfavor. It is believed that Thorolf is keeping back riches for himself and is plotting to become king of the northlands of Norway. Eventually, the king invades Thorolf's land and kills the man. His relatives take vengeance, including Skallagrim, and after this, they banish themselves to Iceland for safety. Finally, Egil enters the story, as a child. His father marries back into the Norwegian line, but his descendents are denied inheritance of the land, and Egil reaps revenge. Various viking raids are recounted. And finally, Egil grows old and settles down to full-time life in Iceland, where in one of his last acts he banishes another family who tries to steal his son's land. The Norwegian family disputes that largely escaped Iceland now come to rest in the new country.

The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal focuses more on a community (i.e., a family or group thereof) than any one person. As such, I found it a bit difficult to follow insofar as there was no center around which to focus my interest. Some individual chapters were engaging. Of the most pleasing were the tales of Ingimund and his sons Thorstein and Jokul (causing much confusion here, many relatives bear the same name). Ingimund lives in Norway and has no interest in moving to Iceland, but a seer prophesies that he will, and eventually, he lets destiny persuade him act accordingly. Once there, he builds a notable homestead and later in the narrative, in kindness, takes in a man no neighbors want living with them. This man one day kills Ingimund when he casts a spear at him, others having previously bothered the man about fishing in a certain river. Ingimund returns home, half a spear still in him, and dies. His sons Thorstein and Jokul decide to exact revenge. Thorstein throughout is the reasoned one, Jokul the hothead. Luckily, the brothers get to the man before his mother, a witch, can cast a spell on them--the brothers kill both. Despite such violence, by and large, Thorstein's more reasoned way of living generally wins out, and the family has peace. (In one interesting episode, a haughty man nearly bumps Thorstein into a fire at a festival Thorstein himself hosts. Jokul knocks the man down. For the insult, the men decide to duel. Thorstein, in an effort to put off the duel, in a manner characteristic of his general generosity, actually places himself under the man's onerous conditions for peace, but when the man insults the family in the process, Thorstein's proffered peace is rescinded. Weather keeps the duel from occurring, and later, when the man and his cohorts attempt to exact more ruin, Thorstein and Jokul gather more men and, with mere threats, send the ruffians packing.) Overall, this saga seemed more concerned with families finding peaceful means to live together than with heroic accounts of battles and adventures.

Like the other long sagas, The Saga of the People of Laxardal involves several generations of a family, but unlike those others, it seems to have a more-unifying feature to keep all the parts working together. That feature involves, fairly early on, a prophecy that is made to a young woman in the tale: Gudrun. And unlike the other tales, the women, especially Gudrun, have a a prominent role here. Gudrun is told that she will marry four men and what the features of each man will be and how they will die. The saga then brings each of those to pass, as she marries a not-so-good man, a rich man, and man of great fame, and so on. But she also has much to do with bringing about the events that happen in her life and in the life of the community. Also of note in the story is Olaf. the son of a woman of noble birth--an Irish queen who was sold into slavery. His children, notably two sons, along with a foster child would divide an inheritance. The foster child would prove to be of some trouble, as he would be the object of jealousy among the various heirs. As long as Olaf is alive, he keeps the peace in the community, but his death brings about a constant striving that happens thereafter. And this is where Gudrun and other women come in. For the fights between the men are often not simply male one-upsmanship. They are inspired by--even pushed upon the men--by the women, who will not stand by to allow their husbands, their children, their heirs to be dishonored. Revenge is often sought at the bequest of the women in the story, rather than initially that of the men. This is my favorite of the longer sagas in the book.

The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey's Godi is a shorter saga centered around one event and as such memorable reading. Essentially, it tells the tale of a man who vows to kill anyone who rides a certain horse of his that he has dedicated to a god. (It reminds me a bit of a similar incident in the book of Judges, wherein a man promises to sacrifice the first thing that exits his house upon his return from battle if he wins: that thing turns out to be his daughter.) The man ends up regretting his vow, but nonetheless he kills the man who rides the horse in an effort to salvage the owner's sheep. Here, the story becomes the familiar one of revenge by feuding families, as the family of the man killed refuses a very generous offer to pay for the death, instead taking the killer to court, and then, instead of that, eventually killing many of the killer's servants and forcing the killer from his land. Time passes, the killer becomes richer in a new land and returns to take his own revenge and retrieve his land.

The Saga of the Confederates is largely a legal drama, with various peoples taking each other to court rather than fighting things out. The hook here, however, is that the court is hardly a place of justice. Odd is a self-made man who ventures off to travel, leaving his farm and his job as the overseer of his community under the management of his friend Ospak. On Odd's return, Ospak does not relinquish his management role until Odd nearly forces him into it, which leads to some bitterness. Ospak handles things by attempting to kill Odd, but instead kills Odd's brother. They go to court to resolve the situation. However, a couple of people at court are jealous of Odd's success, so they dismiss Odd's suit against Ospak on technical grounds (not unlike, it seems, the way our own American system often works). Odd's father steps in and bribes a couple of judges and Ospak ends up getting his just punishment anyway, to the disgust of the two men who tried to dismiss Odd's suit. These two men learn of the bribe and take Odd to court themselves for bribery. Once again, Odd's father bribes a couple of judges, and Odd comes out ahead. Father and son, who early on do not get along well, are reconciled. This piece reads more like a short story than most of the sagas, focused around a distinct set of events and characters as it is. The author obviously didn't think much of Iceland's legal system in the early Middle Ages.

Gisli Sursson's Saga is a tale of revenge that I could see being easily adapted into a movie (albeit a violent one). It starts off rather predictably, with an account of the various families and with a killing. In other words, it's not unlike the other sagas. However, not too far into it, the story settles on Gisli as the main protagonist, a man who avenges the killing at the start of the tale and who then suffers the consequences. The rest of the saga, which is the majority, recounts Gisli's life in hiding, as the relatives of the dead man continually seek him out. In the end, Gisli has to make one final heroic stand, which cannot be said for most of the relatives, who remain more prone to hire bounty killers--most of whom meet death--to do their deeds than to risk their life to avenge the dead man with their own hands.

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue is the tale of a love triangle that ends in tragedy (and starts, as many sagas do, with a prophecy that comes true). The Saga of Ref the Sly made for lively reading, but by the time that I got to it, it hardly seemed that unique (Ref kills a man in revenge, sails from Iceland off to Greenland for safety, is slandered as gay, kills some men in revenge, is sought out, but ducks away from his pursuers, killing a few in the process, repeat revenge plot in Norway, live to old age and die).

The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red's Saga are mostly nonfiction and are interesting as primary documents regarding the Viking exploration of the New World. They don't have quite the rich uniform quality of narrative that some of the better sagas have, however.

The book closes with several tales. I found these interesting, but as long as the sagas sometimes could be, I actually enjoyed those more. The tales seemed like short stories without a lot of character development; the sagas seemed somehow richer.

Introductions and appendixes frame the sagas and tales and provide some very useful background information.

On "The Year's Best Fantasy Stories 11" edited by Arthur W. Saha ***

I don't read too many online fantasy or science fiction stories. Genre fiction isn't generally a big love of mine, and on the whole, I've not found online genre writing to be that good (as opposed to literary writing, of which there is a fine good lot of good stuff). This may be due to the fact that I'm not a fan of the genre of fantasy to begin with--or so I'm learning. If all stories were as good as the "best," however, I'd probably give them more of my attention. Every story in this collection was competent, and some were excellent.

What makes the stories typically more generic, however, and what in some ways is what I find disappointing about most genre fiction is that each story wrapped up fairly well and succinctly. There were a lot of loose ends. One need only look at one of my favorite stories in the collection, "The Storm," by David Morrell. Ostensibly, a story about a storm that literally follows on man around, this was a piece about as fascinating as T. C. Boyle's story "Blood Rain." Watching the character discover what was happening and and all the trouble that this situation brought to those around him was fascinating. Then the story gave us an explanation--a curse placed on the man. I was with the story until the curse, but the latter seemed such a letdown--an easy out for an intolerable but intriguing situation. (The very end, a bit of a twist, at least makes up for some of my disappointment.)

Other favorites included "Unmistakably the Finest," by Scott Bradfield, the story of a woman who discovers success in the form of a preacher she follows--and the resulting trouble that eventually ensues. If one notices a trend here, with me, it's that, for me, the best fantasy is that which seems to be part of our world and twists it around a bit, rather than something that is set in a world of dragons and knights. Realism--and fantastic realism--has always been more to my taste.

An exception to this would be Jane Yolen's "The Foxwife," the tale of a man who discovers he is married to a literal fox. The way in which this story is told reminded me of many of the strange tales I read on the Japanese reading list that I undertook last year. Bizarre enough that I wasn't sure what I was to make of it.

On "New Japanese Voices" edited by Helen Mitsios ***

I first came across this collection when working at a bookstore many years ago. The book came out at that time, and I was very curious about it, but I never got around to reading it--or at least more than one story in it. Now, it's fifteen years later, and the "new" in New Japanese Voices doesn't seem so new anymore. Some of these authors have gone on to quite a bit of fame in English translations; others, I haven't seen anything more of. The works featured in the book are the following:

"A Callow Fellow of Jewish Descent" by Masahiko Shimada
"On Meeting My 100 Percent Women One Fine April Morning" by Haruki Murakami
"Swallowtails" by Shiina Makoto
"God Is Nowhere; God Is Now Here" by Itoh Seikoh
"X-Rated Blanket" by Eimi Yamada
"Yu-Hee" by Yang Ji Lee
"On a Moonless Night" by Sei Takekawa
"Living in a Maze" by Kyoji Kobayashi
"The Imitation of Leibniz" by Genichiro Takahashi
"The Unsinkable Molly Brown" by Tamio Kageyama
"Wine" by Mariko Hayashi
"Kitchen" by Banana Yoshimoto

On the whole, the book presents an interesting smorgasbord of fiction writers in Japan in the late eighties and early nineties. But I can't say that the stories on the whole really hooked me. Standing out the most was probably Murakami's, but that story, which has never seemed that impressive to me before, perhaps stood out here because I've read it two or three times before. Other stories I can remember, now, days after reading them, include Shimada's piece, about a Japanese man who befriends a Jewish man in France (only in the end, we're told the man isn't what he seems, which in turns causes us to rethink the whole story).

I really enjoyed Kobayashi's "Living in a Maze," which recounted the story of a man whose nightmares become his everyday life. Such is an old story form, but the dream here was interesting enough that I was drawn in. The man's date becomes a cow, and then so too do the rest of the people, just as in the movie Jacob's Ladder, all the people become lizards. Cows don't seem nearly as creepy or interesting as giant lizards, and yet the manner in which Kobayshi describes all these events--so realistically--makes the ludicrous and silly seem both horrifying and funny.

Kageyama's "Unsinkable Molly Brown" is about a woman who is so fat that when she takes scuba lessons the instructor's have to take various measures to stop her from floating. Hayashi's "Wine" is about a woman who accidentally buys a very expensive bottle of wine and then can't figure out what to do with it (after all, it's too expensive to drink, and it's too expensive to give as a gift for any but the most special person or special occasion). Takekawa's "On a Moonless Night" is about a woman being eaten by insects--told in a "shocking" manner but, for me, makes it seem over the top. Yamada's "X-Rated Blanket" is more like a prose poem--about a woman's lover (i.e., he is her blanket). "Swallowtails" was about a kid with problems at school who grows butterflies as a hobby at home and probably comes closest to the kind of quieter stories one might expect from an American MFA student or from the master Kawabata.

On "Contemporary Japanese Literature: An Anthology of Fiction, Film, and Other Writing since 1945" edited by Howard Hibbett ***

This anthology from the 1970s provides a good selection of post-World War II authors. Many of these authors I wasn't familiar with, but others--given the time that this anthology was published--I was rather surprised to see in the anthology. That is, the editor seemed to have a good grasp on which authors would have staying power. Mostly, however, I chose to read the anthology, amid all the other reading of Japanese literature I'm doing because I wanted exposure to authors I hadn't already read or didn't know about. A few of them stood out, but the ones who tended to stand out the most, interestingly, were those whose work I was already familiar with. Call it a bias of familiarity, I suppose, but there might also be something in the quality of the material that suggests why their work has gone on to be more familiar than some of the other authors included here. The book included these selections:

Yoshikichi Furui, "Wedlock" (story)
Taeko Kono, "Bone Meat" (story)
Kobo Abe, Friends (play)
Shotaro Yasuoka, "Prized Possessions" (story)
Nobuo Kojima, "The American School" (story)
Akira Kurosawa, Ikuru (screenplay)
Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story (screenplay)
Taijun Takeda, "To Build a Bridge" (story)
Yumiko Kurahashi, "To Die at the Estuary" (story)
Yukio Mishima, "The Boy Who Wrote Poetry" (story)
Yasunari Kawabata, "The Pomegranate," "The Camellia," "The Plum," "The Jay," "Summer and Winter," "The Bamboo Leaves," and "The Cereus" (stories)
Mitsuhara Kaneko, "Song of Loneliness," "The Sun," and "The Receiver" (poems)
Hiroshi Sekine, "Abe Sada," "The Golden Pavilion," and "Dream Island" (poems)
Ryuichi Tamura, "The Man with a Green Face" and "Human House" (poems)
Minoru Yoshioka, "Still Life" (1), "Still Life" (2), "Paul Klee's Dining Table," and "Nude Woman" (poems)
Mieko Kanai, "The House of Madam Juju" (poem)
Akira Abe, "Peaches" (story)
Junichiro Tanizaki, "The Bridge of Dreams" (story)
Tatsuo Nagai, "Brief Encounter" (story)
Junnosuke Yoshiyuki, "In Akiko's Room" (story)
Kenzaburo Oe, "Aghwee the Sky Monster" (story)
Akiyuki Nosaka, "American Hijiki" (story)

Highlights of the anthology included the first piece, by Furui, which was about a fairly young couple living in an apartment building among young rowdy workers. The couple's male half, who typically spends his days at work, gets sick, so he gets to spend time learning what his wife's life is like during the day.

Another interesting one was Kobo Abe's play Friends. The situation essentially involves a family that decides that its duty is to help out people who live alone, people who must obviously be lonely. The way to do this is to move in with the single person and make him part of your family. (Never mind that in this case, the man had a fiancée.) So this family comes and takes over his apartment, and the man is unable to get rid of them. They live off all that he earns, eat all that he brings home for food. The play is rather absurd, as many plays are, but enjoyable. It reminded me in a way of a Japanese film I did not like called Audition, in which a woman "auditions" to be a man's girlfriend (he poses as a director in order to find a girlfriend, auditioning each one); the situation soon becomes disturbing as she proves to be psychotic. (In the play's rather absurd premise it also reminds me of a great Japanese film that I loved called After Death, but I won't go into that here.) Friends is a pleasant and light play; Audition is not pleasant or light--it is horrifying. But they both share that same dubiousness regarding connection and family and duty, all of which I would guess carry much heavier feelings of obligation than they do in the West. Hence, by the end of the play, when the man is literally caged, like an animal, to teach him a lesson (if only he'd appreciated the family that had moved in with him, he could have just enjoyed the experience rather than being so miserable and having to be punished), one gets a sense the author is drawing some sort of parallel to the idea of family within the culture as a whole.

Akira Kurosawa's screenplay was also really good--and, I think, more concisely written than Abe's play. I've only Kurosawa's Ran. It's these stories of traditional Japan for which he seems most famous here in the States, but the editor of the anthology notes that Kurosawa actually prefers his films about contemporary Japan. For my taste, if most of them are like this screenplay, I can see why. I was not a huge fan of Ran, but I really liked Ikuru. The film is about a man who works for a bureaucratic section of the government. The job of government employees seems to be mainly to avoid letting people get help--each employee just passes customers to the next employee and on it goes down the line. One of these bureaucrats, however, learns he's dying of cancer and doesn't have long to live. So the rest of the film, he's questioning his purpose in life. And by the end, he has found it--fighting the bureaucracy of which he is a member. It was a pretty upbeat movie, with a share of funny moments.

Of the poetry, Mieko Kanai's "The House of Madam Juju" stood out the most to me--an exploration of Japanese beauty, as it has been commercialized for women.

Akira Abe's story "Peaches" is about memory--one memory. The character thinks about a time when his mother and he pushed a stroller of peaches down a hill, and it was a cold winter night, and his mom put her shawl around him. But then he deconstructs the memory, noting that the events could not have happened as he remembered them. There would not be peaches in winter. So which part of the memory is he making up? He circles round and round, trying to sort out all the various events that may have led to this one memory. In the end, he never does figure it out. Sometimes, I think keeping a diary could be of use for precisely this. I know that one time I was recounting something I'd done, and then I went back and checked a diary I had kept of the events and realized I'd merged several days of events into one day. But I don't generally keep a diary. I wonder how many other events have gotten merged and messed up in my head over the years. "Peaches" was an interesting exploration of how our minds trick us.

Perhaps the best short story in the book was by Kenzaburo Oe. I say this with some surprise, having read Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids a few years ago and not having been that moved by it. It was fine, but nothing that made me want to read more of his stuff. But "Aghwee the Sky Monster" is a piece I think I will remember for a while. It's about a man hired to take care of a musician who has supposedly gone insane--the musician has a baby in the sky who comes to visit him from time to time; conversations ensue, which, of course, embarrass the young caretaker. But there's a big back story that readers slowly discover, which makes the intriguing and ridiculous situation even more interesting. I'll have to give another Oe novel a read.

The last story, "American Hajiki," is a humorous piece that echoes some of the themes of Friends, but puts those themes in a political context. It's about a man who lived during World War II whose wife has invited some Americans to take a Japanese vacation at their home. The wife had previously visited them in America and has been a pen pal for some time. The husband is none too pleased by the wife's offer. The lead-up to the visit and eventual visit are mixed with the man's memories of the early postwar days. The man comes to wonder why it is that, in the end, who always ends up "serving" his American masters--and so wanting to serve them, despite the fact that they killed his father. There's quite a bit of humor amid the various cultural misunderstandings that go on.

On "Anthology of Japanese Literature," compiled and edited by Donald Keene ****

For an uninitiated person like me, this was a really good quick and dirty rundown on early Japanese literature. And that is partly why I picked it over other anthologies, which seemed too long or too focused. Keene aims rather to give a person a real feel for what the Japanese were writing up until 1870, and with just 450 pages, he appears to do an excellent job. (Another anthology I am planning to read will cover the post-1945 period, and yet another the late 1980s, so I'll have covered pretty much the swoop of Japanese literature, save the realism/naturalism/Meiji eras between 1870 and 1945, which is a bit of shame--I had thought I'd caught that period in one of the anthologies but apparently not, though many of the writers from those periods do show up in one anthology or another via their early or late work.) So here's a short rundown on the works (most of the selections, some of them complete) in Keene's anthology:

Ancient Period (to 794 A.D.)
Man'yoshu
The Luck of the Sea and the Luck of the Mountains
Kaifuso

Heian Period (794-1185)
Kukai: Kukai and His Master
The Tales of Ise
Kokinshu
Ki No Tsurayuki: TheTosa Diary
Poetry from Six Collections
The Mother of Michitsuna: Kagero Nikki
Murasaki Shikibu: Yugao (from The Tale of Genji, which is available here)
Sei Shonagon: The Pillow Book
Murasaki Shikibu: Diary (available here)
The Daughter of Takasue: The Sarashina Diary (available here or here)
Poetry in Chinese
Ryojin Hisho
The Lady Who Loved Insects

Kamakura Period (1185-1333)
The Tale of Heike
Shinkokinshu
Kamo No Chomei: An Account of My Hut
Tales from the Uji Collection
The Captain of Naruto

Muromachi Period (1333-1600)
Yoshida Kenko: Essays in Idleness
The Exile of Godaigo
Seami Motokiyo: The Art of the No
Kan'ami: Kiyotsugu: Sotoba Komachi
Seami Motokiyo: Birds of Sorrow
Seami Motokiyo: Atsumori
Seami Motokiyo: The Damask Drum
The Bird-Catcher of Hades
Busu
Poems in Chinese by Buddhist Monks
Three Poets at Minase
The Three Priests

Tokugawa Period (1600-1868)
Ihara Saikaku: What the Seasons Brought to the Almanac-Maker
Ihara Saikaku: The Umbrella Oracle
Ihara Saikaku: The Eternal Storehouse of Japan
Matsuo Basho: The Narrow Road of Oku
Matsuo Basho: Prose Poem on the Unreal Dwelling
Mukai Kyorai: Conversations with Kyorai
Haiku by Basho and His School
Chikamatsu on the Art of the Puppet Stage
Chikamatsu Monzaemon: The Loves Suicides of Sonezaki
Ejima Kiseki: A Wayward Wife
Jippensha Ikku: Hizakurige
Takizawa Bakin: Shino and Hamaji
Haiku of the Middle and Late Tokugawa Period
Waka of the Tokugawa Period
Poetry and Prose in Chinese

Of the first four sections, I particularly enjoyed the poems selected from Man'yoshu, the passage from the Sarashina Diary, and Kamo No Chomei's "An Account of My Hut." Man'yoshu is one of the first major works in Japanese literature--it's a collection of poetry put together by an emperor, from various sources. And its quality seems outstanding, at least in the selections Keene has chosen. While British literature starts with a story of Grendel, in the epic poem Beowulf, which sounds much more interesting than I ever found it to actually be, and American literature starts with Puritan sermons, Japanese literature starts with poetry. Okay, there are prose pieces that are like myths--some similar to Native American materials (which are usually unintelligible to me and not very interesting)--but most of the early stuff is poetry, simple lyric poetry, short, as Japanese poetry tends to be. And I enjoy it. I think what I like about the poetry as opposed to the more mythic pieces in our English literature is that it's easy to identify, to understand what the poet is writing and experiencing. And that's also part of what's so interesting, these poets thinking about their mortality, about the weather, about love--they're writing over one thousand years ago, and they could be writing now. I don't know if that's comforting or sad or what, the idea that humans struggle with the same issues through time immemorial. Maybe it's just surreal, when I think about how long ago that was and how much similar it was to today, and how, if time goes on, humans will be worrying and thinking about the same thing a thousand years after I'm gone also.

The Sarashina Diary centered around a woman whose parents sent her to the royal court to live. She was older, around twenty-six, and unmarried. She didn't really want to go, but did in deference to authority. She'd heard that many women found husbands there, though she figured herself a bit too old for that. As the plot fell out, it was hard to believe this was a diary, rather than a short story. It seemed complete and thematic and sad, with a rise and climax and fall as in any good story. The woman, as it turns out, does meet a man one day. But it is only for a brief period. They exchange a few messages via poetry, but for whatever reason circumstances don't allow them to actually begin communicating much in person (there are always others around for one). About six months later, without contact, the man shows up at a social function in hopes of seeing her. She doesn't know and so misses him. He comes to visit her, leaves a note. She misses him again but writes a reply. Alas, he is gone by the time its ready. Such a sad story of near meetings. What also struck me about this piece, and many others, however, was how prevalent poetry seems to have been in the society then. People wrote of their day in poetry, and they courted in poetry as well--exchanging haiku and tanka with potential mates. Wouldn't it be a curious world if we did that nowadays? But maybe e-mail is equivalent. Somehow, it just doesn't seem as romantic as a poem.

As for "An Account of My Hut," it was a piece that reminded me a lot of Ecclesiastes. Kamo No Chomei was a Buddhist who, in this short account, thinks heavily about his life, about the happenings in Japan, and about how little of it is of any lasting consequence. Amid all this there are recountings of several distasters that hit Japan during a relatively short span during his life (an earthquake, a plague), as well as recountings of his homes, which get progressively smaller as he ages. In the end, he realizes he needs little more than a ten-foot hut--and he ponders why he's even bother to write. Lots of deep thinking. It's pretty short. I wish there were a translated version available online to share.

From the Tokugawa Period there was also much to admire. Three works in particular stood out for me, two of which I'd like to return to at some point to read the rest of the work. Ihara Saikaku's "What the Seasons Brought to the Almanac-Maker," one section from his novel Five Women Who Loved Love, seemed intriguing to me in part because of its fairly modern-seeming structure. I tend to go for those kind Gertrude Stein-type Three Lives books. This one covers five lives, specifically the erotic parts of them at that--and in seventeenth-century Japan, there is much to be curious about, given the very different times and culture.

I also liked Jippensha Ikku Hizakurige, a tale of two travelers on the road. Apparently Jippenshu wrote a whole series of these, all of the light and humorous but nevertheless providing an entertaining and interesting insight into the Japanese culture of the early 1800s.

Finally, the poems and prose in Chinese were interesting if not for themselves then for the historical perspective that they offered. Keene chooses to end his anthology with a set of works that discuss, in particular, the coming of Westerners, the opening of the ports, and Japan's seeming weakness in the face of these. There is much criticism in these poems and the one short profile offered of the leaders who fail to fight back, who let the barbarian Westerners in. And there is hate--hate of the Dutch and of the Russians and of all the others from the West; and hate also, for Japanese themselves, who feel as if in this dawning of a new age, Japan has lost its way and its power. In some eras, women act like men, one writer intones sadly (contemporary political correctness aside), while in others men act like women.