| NOTA |
(★)(´BIO-0044´ es mismo libro con tapa blanda.／ Higuchi Ichiyoo, modern Japan´s most important woman writer, lived a life as brief and poignant as any nineteenth-century heroine of fiction -a life of struggle against poverty and neglect, and of triumph cut short by death from consumption. This book is both a biography of Ichiyoo and an anthology of nine of her best-known short stories, most of them translated into English for the first time. The juxtaposition of these stories and the colorful life and milieu that inspired them not only introduces this writer of genius but also offers a vivid picture of urban Japan during one of the most fascinating periods of that country´s long history, the Meiji era at the turn of the century.／ Although Ichiyoo looked back to the great Japanese classics for her inspiration, she was very much a woman of her time and contributed her own innovations to Meiji literature. She was the first Japanese writer in modern times to treat the plight of women seriously and to see dignity and pathos in childhood and in the painful process of growing up. When poverty forced her family out of the genteel neighborhoods of Tokyo and into the back streets behind the pleasure quarter, she discovered the subject matter for her greatest fiction : the unconventional lives of courtesans, ne´er-do-wells, and children growing up on the fringes of society.／ ◆Robert Danly has brought an exceptional gift for translation to his work of weaving excerpts from Ichiyoo´s superb diary into this moving biography ; and in the selected stories that he translates he presents us with works justly celebrated for their delicacy of understanding, brilliant style, and vivid local color. Ichiyoo, in speaking to her times, spoke for all times ; in these pages she comes fully alive for Western readers, in her humanity as well as her genius - her daily occupations and her intrepid pursuit of literary fame. Robert Lyons Danly is assistant professor of Far Eastern Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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