Author: Peter Gordon

“Across the Ussuri Kray: Travels in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains” by Vladimir K Arsenyev, translated by Jonathan C Slaght

Vladimir K Arsenyev was an army officer, explorer and writer active in Russia’s Far East in the waning years of the Romanov dynasty. His major claim to fame, outside Russia at any rate, is having introduced the world to the aboriginal hunter and trapper Dersu Uzala, who several decades later became the subject of an Oscar-winning film by Akira Kurosawa.

Arsenyev undertook several expeditions in the mountainous region roughly between Vladivostok and the Chinese border in the first years of the twentieth-century, ostensibly to survey the region’s infrastructure. But Arsenyev’s extensive field journals became the basis of two books of what would now be called “travel literature”. Across the Ussuri Kray: Travels in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains was the first of these, published in Vladivostok in 1921 in the midst of the Russian Civil War, and is the account of of two separate expeditions in 1902 and 1906. This volume is available in a new translation by Jonathan C Slaght.

Continue reading →

“Are You an Echo?: The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko”

After the 2011 tsunami, TV commercials were, out of respect, replaced with public service messages. One was the following poem:

 

If I say, “Let’s play?”
you say, “Let’s play!”
If I say, “Stupid!”
you say, “Stupid!”
If I say, “I don’t want to play anymore,”
you say, “I don’t want to play anymore.”
And then, after a while,
becoming lonely
I say, “Sorry.”
You say, “Sorry.”
Are you just an echo?
No, you are everyone.

 

Continue reading →

“The Music Child and the Mahjong Queen” by Alfred A Yuson

Alfred A Yuson’s The Music Child was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize at a time when the prize was for unpublished manuscripts. Although the finished novel took the better part of a decade to finally emerge, The Music Child and the Mahjong Queen exemplifies the Prize’s objective of facilitating the publication of new and eye-opening Asian fiction.

Continue reading →

“A History of Modern Chinese Fiction” by CT Hsia

Those with an academic interest in Chinese literature are undoubtedly aware of the CT Hsia classic History of Modern Chinese Fiction which has just been reissued by the Chinese University Press. Those who aren’t might find the thought of a 600-page tome of literary criticism to be more than a little daunting; that would be a pity, for the volume is an example of erudition and clarity of expression.

Continue reading →

“Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women” by Kittredge Cherry

Princeton University, or at least the HR department, recently promulgated new policies discouraging if not quite banning such terms as “man made”, “manpower” and “man” (as a verb); these are to be replaced with such gender-neutral terms as “artificial” and “staff” (as noun and verb). “Workmanlike” is to become “skillful” (although they don’t seem exact synonyms to me). It’s easy to make fun of such pronouncements; after all, the use of male terms for gender-neutral concepts predates even English itself. Exactly, women might reply.

It was with this political-linguistic issue in mind that I read Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women. Japanese is, or at least seems to be, an order of magnitude more gender-layered than English and Womensword is an attempt to pick these meanings apart and does so with clarity and good humor. But it seems that on the whole, author Kittredge Cherry is of the view that gender differentiation in Japanese is a flexible device rather than one constituting an instrument of social exclusion; indeed, she intends the book “to honor the women of Japan”.

Continue reading →