Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity (Hardcover)

by Professor Dennis Washburn (Author)
Key Phrases: modern ethical consciousness, monogatari hyóshaku, gendai bungaku zenshú, Mount Fuji, Meiji Japan, Charter Oath (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

""

"[An] inspired and intelligent volume." -- Choice

"Washburn's study offers insightful and engaging readings with perceptive cross-references and intelligent interpretations." -- Monumenta Nipponica

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""An intelligent contribution to ongoing debates in Japanese literary studies... [Washburn] is to be congratulated. " -- Michael K Bourdaghs, Journal of Japanese Studies

Review

" Translating Mount Fuji's scholarship and writing are of high quality. Dennis Washburn makes a serious attempt to engage the reader in matters of concern to those who teach modern Japanese literature and speaks intelligently to a sophisticated audience with interests in the intellectual and ethical problems attendant upon the transition from a traditional society to a modern one." -- Elaine Gerbert, associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures, the University of Kansas

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (October 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 023113892X
• ISBN-13: 978-0231138925
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,974,562 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lost in Mount Fuji's Translation, March 15, 2007

By	Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Whew. You might feel like you've actually climbed Mount Fuji after reading this book. It is an extremely dense exercise in literary criticism, written by Dennis Washburn primarily (or so it seems) for the appreciation, edification, and enjoyment of his peers, i.e. other professors of Japanese literature. Very little about this book is user-friendly, and it probably takes itself a little too seriously. And whole paragraphs are loaded down with rather turgid abstractions about identity, ideology, authenticity, modernity, and other boogaboos that keep folks in academia awake at night.

Still, for all that, there's much that's of interest in these chapters. I'm a bit biased, of course, for Washburn discusses some of my favorite authors (Ueda Akinari and Natsume Soseki) as well as ones I follow regularly (Mori Ogai and Yokomitsu Riichi), along with one I'm not so familiar with (Ooka Shohei) and one I generally love to hate (Mishima Yukio). He even gets a word in edgewise about Murakami Haruki in the epilogue, which is all fine and well, if a bit rushed and sudden--like he's changing the subject rather than bringing the book to a satisfying conclusion. The parts in each chapter where Washburn analyzes the specific novels of these particular writers in detail are more or less full of intriguing and convincing analysis--these were the meaty bits, as far as I was concerned. As a whole, though, the book doesn't cohere quite so well, giving the sense of a bunch of good independent articles rather sloppily wielded together with vague invocations of common themes and issues tacked on after the fact--at least that was my impression, though I'll admit it's quite possible that I just didn't "get it" upon a single read-through. Often the intended referents in the abstract bits framing each chapter remained fuzzy and unclear to me, and the relation to the chapter's main focus tenuous or else abrupt though never, I must say, completely arbitrary. As a nitpick, too, it seems that any book that hopes to address issues of cultural identity and its political and ethical reverberations should probably include some mention of Kawabata Yasunari at least if not Tanizaki Jun'ichiro as well ("In Praise of Shadows" especially)--no book can include everything, of course, but these seem like glaring omissions for any adequate consideration of the subject at hand. But so it goes; perhaps they were too "obvious" to be included.

In any case, "Translating Mount Fuji" is alternately fascinating and frustrating if consistently heavy-going and just a tad overwrought, but overall it's well worth wading through if you are seriously studying modern Japanese literature.