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(★)(新訳 坊っちゃん／ ´NI-0434´es mismo libro.／ Translated by J. Cohn／ Like ´The Catcher in the Rye´ or ´The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn´, ´Botchan´, a hilarious tale about a young man´s rebellion against ´the system´ in a country school, is a classic of its kind. Among Japanese readers both young and old it has enjoyed a timeless popularity, making it, according to Donald Keene, ´probably the most widely read novel in modern Japan.´／ The setting is Japan´s deep south, where the author himself spent some time teaching English in a boys´ school. Into this conservative world, with its social proprieties and establishing pecking order, breezes Botchan, down from the big city, with scant respect for either his elders or his noisy young charges ; and the result is a chain of collisions large and small.／ Much of the story seems to occur in summer, against the drone of cicadas, and in many ways this is a summer book --light, funny, never slow-moving. Here, in a lively new translation much better suited to Western tastes than any of its forebears, ´Botchan´s´ homespun appeal is all the more apparent, and even those who have never been near the sunlit island on which these calamitous episodes take place should find in it uninterrupted entertainment.／ ◆Natsume Sooseki, one of Japan´s most acclaimed and beloved writers, was born in Tokyo in 1867. After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University with a degree in English literature, he spent a few years teaching in secondary schools on the southern islands of Shikoku and Kyushu. In 1900 he was sent to England by the Japanese government to pursue further literary studies. He returned to Japan in 1903 and became a lecturer in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, the first native Japanese to hold this post. For the next four years he combined his academic work with the composition of a series of fictional works including the novels ´I am a Cat´, ´Botchan´, and ´The Three-Cornered World´, which established him as a writer of major importance.／ In 1907 he resigned from the university to devote himself to full-time literary work. The lighthearted satirical spirit of some of his early writing gradually gave way to a darker, deeper quality as he probed the themes of solitude, alienation, and other social and psychological consequences of modern life in a series of celebrated novels including ´Sanshiroo´, ´And Then´, ´The Gate´, ´The Wayfarer´, and ´Kokoro´. He died in 1916.／ J. Cohn studied Japanese at Cornell and Harvard universities, as well as in Japan, and now teaches Japanese literature at the University of Hawaii. He is the author of a study on the comic spirit in modern Japanese fiction.) |
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