Category: Japanese Program

Prof. John Nathan published his new book, “Sōseki” Modern Japan’s Greatest Novelist from Columbia University Press.

In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Sōseki’s complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Sōseki’s groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Sōseki’s fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer’s life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author. The first full-length study of Sōseki in fifty years, Nathan’s biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated the modernism of the twentieth century.

Full article available here:

Columbia University Press

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/sseki/9780231171427

On November 22, 2017, Iwanami Shoten (岩波書店) published 日本放浪記 (Nippon hoorooki), the Japanese translation of John Nathan’s 2008 memoir, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere.

From best-selling novelist Mizumura Minae’s  comment on the cover of the Japanese edition:

“This is a tale of one man’s ambition, his disappointments, and his loves, and is at the same time an invaluable chronicle of Japan’s postwar literary community. Unflaggingly fascinating!”

Praise from American critics:

“In narrating the events of his life, in its ups, downs and (predominantly) swerves, Nathan brings a talent for characterization, a splendid ability in scene setting, and an acute power of dramatizing incidents…His portrait of his stormy relationships with strong personalities, such as Mishima, Shintaro Katsu, and Sony chairman Norio Ohga are pointed and insightful, often yielding memorable moments…an enthralling read.”(Evergreen Review, 2008)

“Nathan is a practiced storyteller. “Living Carelessly” is an engaging chronicle of his passionate lifelong involvement with Japan.  It offers a vivid picture  of Japanese culture from someone who infiltrated it intimately…”Living Carelessly” is also a candid confessional portrait of a man so driven to prove his artistic talents (to himself and to others) that his achievements in several realms fail to satisfy him. Yet as this memoir makes clear, his achievements, while falling short of his dreams–whose don’t?–add up to more than he thinks.”  (Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 30, 2008).