New Leaves: Studies and Translations of Japanese Literature in Honor of Edward Seidensticker.

AuthorO'Brien, James

Edward Seidensticker, in whose honor this Festschrift was compiled, spent over a decade in postwar Japan pursuing a variety of occupations. Following a brief stint in the Foreign Service, he opted for a career as a journalist and teacher-scholar in Tokyo. When he moved to Stanford in 1962, his reputation as a superb translator of both classical and modern Japanese literature was already established. Several of his graduate students at Stanford, along with a number from Michigan and Columbia, where he went on to teach, have contributed to New Leaves.

The volume contains a bibliography of Seidensticker's work, compiled by Aileen Gatten and Frank Joseph Shulman, as well as a biographical sketch by Gatten. The essays and translations confirm the claim in the sketch that Seidensticker could nurture talent along many different lines. There is work here from Heian and Edo, as well as from the entire range of the modern period. Translation and historical exercises predominate, but there is also some interesting criticism and commentary, all of it arranged in more or less chronological order. Quite a few nooks and crannies of Japanese literature are explored. Indeed, New Leaves is so eclectic that I will only indicate the nature of each selection in turn, adding where appropriate a brief comment.

Aileen Gatten leads off with a selection entitled "Death and Salvation in Genji Monogatari." Scrutinizing a number of death scenes in the narrative - the principals, except for one instance, are women - Gatten sketches several basic distinctions regarding types of death in the tale, carefully illustrating each with reference to the text. What struck me as original about the essay was the reference to motifs surrounding death in the Ojoden literature that parallel those seen in Genji. The author also surveys death scenes in pre-Genji prose literature, the paucity of which came as a surprise to me.

T. J. Harper deals with "Genji Gossip," an entirely different subject from the tale itself. From the composition of Genji to the rise of serious scholarship concerning it, the practice of conversing about the work came into being, a practice that manifests itself in those conspicuous Heian genres, the journal and the diary. Harper translates three short samples of what he terms a sub-genre of Genji gossip - the list of superlatives. The categories include such matters as "Amusing Things" and "Fretful Times," such objects as "Man," "Pretty Face," and "Prose...

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