| NOTA |
(★)(Translated by Damian Flanagan)／ Joint winner of the 2005 Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature／ Titulo original : 倫敦塔[Rondon-too]／ From October 1900 to December 1902, a reluctant and then unknown Sooseki Natsume came to London on a meager government stipend to study his beloved English literature and equip himself for a university position back home. It was not a happy time for him. Faced with intense cultural shock and social alienation, he suffered a nervous breakdown and later described his stay as ´like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves.´ Nevertheless, as with all great writers, he managed to turn adversity into raw material for his art and his London experiences yielded several penetrating yet hallucinatory pieces worked up from his London notes, including ´Letter from London (1901)´, ´Bicycle Diary (1903)´, ´The Tower of London´ and ´The Carlyle Museum (1905)´, and seven sketches from ´Short Pieces for Long Days (1909)´. In his vivid imagination, profoundly influenced by Zen philosophy, London is transformed : the Thames becomes the river Styx, the Tower of London a gateway to the Underworld, and the streets and boarding houses are peopled with the spirits of the dead.／ ◆Sooseki Natsume (1867-1916) is widely considered the foremost novelist of the Meiji period (1868-1914). After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University in 1893, Sooseki taught high school before spending two years in England on a Japanese government scholarship. He returned to lecture in English literature at the university. Numerous nervous disorders forced him to give up teaching in 1908 and he became a full-time writer for the Asahi Simbun. In addition to fourteen novels, Sooseki wrote haiku, poems in the Chinese style, academic papers on literary theory, essays, autobiographical sketches, and fairy tales.／ Damian Flanagan was born in Manchester, England, in 1969, and graduated in English Literature from Cambridge University in 1992 (after taking a year off to live and study in Japan). From 1993 he studied at Kobe University, and in 2000 became the first Westerner to be awarded a Ph.D. in Japanese Literature there. In 2003 he published his first book in Japanese, a controversial study of Sooseki Natsume. In addition to his translation of and introduction to this edition of ´The Tower of London´, published in 2005 at the start of a major Sooseki relaunch in the UK, Dr Flanagan is working on introductions to more classic Sooseki novels and on his own fiction. He is also a regular contributor of articles on literature, politics, and society for the Japanese press.) |
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