| | - The BoxerI checked out Kenzaburo Oë's A Personal Matter from the library today. I have to say that whenever I read any piece of fiction by an Asian (or even Asian-American) author, I have a morbid fascination with the little book review blurbs printed on the cover. Almost without fail, they describe such literature as "lush," "exotic," and other similar adjectives. Whether these adjectives actually apply to the author in question's work is really a matter of opinion, so while I roll my eyes and snicker at the flagrant exoticism in these reviews, I realize that because they are people's opinions, in the end, I truly don't care that much.
However, when such reviewers state things that are just factually wrong, there just is no excuse.
I saw this review on the back of A Personal Matter:
Oë is an astonishing Japanese writer whose books deal with postwar youth with such uncompromising realism that he seems to have wrenched Japanese literature free from its deeply rooted, inbred tradition and moved it into the mainstream of world literature.
"Inbred"?
Seriously, "inbred"? There were three million better ways to write that sentence that would make it sound, you know, not nearly as condescending. The reviewer could have written that blurb in such a way that wouldn't betray the clear bias towards Japanese literature - that before Oë, Japanese literature was alien and inaccessible to Western literary circles. Primitive, if you will.
Furthermore, "an astonishing Japanese writer"? He's not simply an "astonishing writer"? What in the hell kind of damning-with-faint-praise, backhanded compliment is that? "Oh, he's pretty good... for a Japanese writer."
But the patronizing, Orientalist tone of this review is actually the least of my objections. What jars me most is the reviewer's obvious ignorance of Japanese contribution to world literature. Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima had been world-renowned writers even before Oë stepped into the literary scene. Kawabata won the damned Nobel Prize, for crying out loud - a clear signifier of someone who has moved into the "mainstream of world literature." Shusako Endo, Oë's contemporary, was a Japanese Catholic, and thus wrote from the perspective of an outsider - hardly representative of a "deeply rooted, inbred tradition."
I read a similarly-worded review about this same work that claimed that Oë was the first Japanese writer to tackle sex so frankly. Once again, haven't these people read Mishima? And he tackled the topic of homosexuality in pretty frank terms in Confessions of a Mask, written two decades before Oë released A Personal Matter. Hell, one can go back pretty far to find instances of Japanese writers dealing frankly with sex: Tale of the Genji, which was written in the eleventh century - don't they do it nonstop in that book?
Good Lord, are these people illiterate?
Argh.
I just... argh.
</rant> |
| | Posted 4/10/2006 10:17 PM - 43 Views - 4 eProps - 2 comments
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