Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

My favorite line about writing reviews comes from Oscar Wilde: “I never read books I must review; it prejudices you so.” But I actually did read Ken Ito’s new study, An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel (Stanford University Press), and my review has just been published in the latest issue of Monumenta Nipponica. In what I thought was a fine book, Ito takes up several enormously popular potboilers of the late Meiji period and unpacks the complex, often self-contradictory logics by which they work. I think I got a little carried away by my own rhetoric in the review, but here’s the conclusion:

Ito provides us with illuminating, careful readings of some of the most popular works published in the Meiji period—works whose tainted pedigree has scared away many previous scholars. He demonstrates these novels to be crucial sites of the cultural work needed to produce modern Japan. An Age of Melodrama forces us to redraw our genealogical charts of modern Japanese literature: whether by adoption or marriage, previously neglected relations must be accepted into the family. The proud patriarchs of the canon may scowl when forced to open the gates of their estates to these uncouth relations—but as Meiji melodramas loved to show, there is nothing so turbulent as domestic family life.

I, in turn, have recently become the target of a reviewer’s eye. A glowing notice by Wendy Jacobson on Avery 4: An Anthology of New Fiction appears in the most recent issue of Book/Mark Quarterly Review. She praises the collection as “a fine sampling from a group of talented writers who are on their way to increased notoriety and success” (editorial comment: notoriety, perhaps; success, perhaps not) and highlights my short story “Invasive Species” as being “told with poetic mature insight.” The whole issue is well worth your while, and I promise that reading it won’t prejudice you in the least. You can order it here for a mere ten bucks.