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About us contact details Catalogue
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“Filled
with beautiful and disturbing imagery, [Shanghai] focuses on the lives of
a group of Japanese expatriates living in Shanghai, a veritable cauldron
of political and social unrest. . . . Dennis Washburn’s
graceful translation is augmented by an insightful afterword.” “Deftly
translated into English by Dennis Washburn . . . the novel’s
sweeping depiction of a city that no longer exists as it did in the 1920s
is a masterful and compelling re-creation of the past.” “This
book is a riveting read for anyone interested in Japanese Modernism and
the development of the ‘subject’ in the Japanese novel. Shanghai is a
tour de force of naturalistic writing, its terse prose involving all five
senses to plunge the reader into the world of the novel. Washburn’s
translation is to such a high standard that a cinematic feel to the story
results. In the light of Washburn’s analysis [in his postscript],
Yokomitsu’s ‘Modernist’ manifesto on subjectivity and objectivity
attains clarity and context, which for this reader—above and beyond the
fact that Shanghai is a good read in itself—makes this the best
translation of a Japanese novel to be seen in years.” Shanghai,
published serially between 1928 and 1931, tells the story of a group of
Japanese expatriates living in the International Settlement at the time of
the May 30th Incident of 1925. The personal lives and desires of the main
characters play out against a historical backdrop of labor unrest,
factional intrigue, colonialist ambitions, and racial politics. The
author, Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947), was an essayist, writer, and
critical theorist who became one of the most powerful and influential
literary figures in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1924 Yokomitsu
joined with Kataoka Teppei and Kawabata Yasunari to found the Shinkankaku-ha
(New Sensation School). Shinkankaku artists looked to contemporary
avant-garde movements in Europe—Dadaism, futurism, surrealism,
expressionism—for inspiration in their effort to explode the conventions
of literary language and to break free of what they saw as the prisonhouse
of modern culture. No unified literary style emerged from the efforts of
the school, but a key feature of its experiments was the use of jarring
imagery that originated in the group’s fascination with the visual
effects of cinema. Yokomitsu
incorporated the striking visuality of his early experimental style into a
realistic mode that presents a disturbing picture of a city in turmoil.
The result is a brilliant evocation of Shanghai as a gritty ideological
battleground and as an exotic landscape where dreams of sexual and
economic domination are nurtured. Published by Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan |
