Mountain/Home: New Translations from Japan (MĀNOA 29:2)

The new issue of MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, volume 29 number 2, is a collection of Japanese literature in translation edited by Leza Lowitz and Frank Stewart.

From the editors:

Mountain/Home presents new translations of selected Japanese works from the medieval period to the present. The volume opens with traditional folktales, court poetry, Edo Period poetry, and contemporary fiction—all from “One Hundred Literary Views of Mount Fuji,” a collection of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction related to Japan’s national symbol. The works reveal how Japanese attitudes toward Mount Fuji have changed over time, particularly after the country was opened to the West in the nineteenth century.

Table of Contents

One Hundred Literary Views of Mount Fuji: Mount Fuji has been celebrated by poets, novelists, and playwrights for almost 1,500 years, from Japan’s earliest literary works to the present. Peter MacMillan provides these translations and introductions.

• The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter: Taketori Monogatari, a tenth-century tale, recounts the origin of Mount Fuji’s name and is one of the earliest examples of Japanese literary fiction.
• Love Song and Reply: These poems are from the Gosen Wakashū, a major tenth-century anthology of Japanese poetry. Many of the waka in the collection are “dialogue poems,” written in pairs by men and women of the court, speaking the cloaked language of secret love affairs, seductions, and laments.
• from The Confessions of Lady Nijo: Lost for over six hundred years, Lady Nijo’s manuscript was discovered by a Japanese scholar in the Imperial Library in 1940.
• A Tale of a Mount Fuji Cave: This story from the Kamakura Period tells of a journey to the mouth of hell and back.
• Two Haiku by Matsuo Bashō: His poetry broke from the decadent style of the time, finding instead a resonance with nature, simplicity, spontaneity, and originality.
• Sanshirō: In this excerpt from Natsume Soseki’s 1908 coming-of-age novel, the protagonist, Ogawa Sanshiro, is twenty-three years old.

Yoshioka Minoru: A Life of Poetry: An introduction and translations by Eric Selland

• Still Life (poems) by Yoshioka Minoru
• Monks (poems) by Yoshioka Minoru

Ayukawa Nobuo: Poet of Arechi: An introduction by Shogo Oketani. Translations by Leza Lowitz and Shogo Oketani

• from America and Other Poems by Ayukawa Nobuo

Three Linked Stories by Kurahashi Yumiko and translated by S. Yumiko Hulvey

Shining Genji: Introduction and translations by Charles De Wolf

• The Cicada Shell, from The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu

Villon’s Woman by Dazai Osamu and translated by Ralph McCarthy

Sketches: A Man and His Home by Takahashi Mutsuo and translated by Jeffrey Angles

Haiku by Takahashi Mutsuo and translated by Jeffrey Angles and Emiko Miyashita

Plus illustrations and contributor notes.

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Browse full-text of Mountain/Home online at Project MUSE.

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Launched in 1989 at the University of Hawai`i, MĀNOA brings the literature of Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas to English-speaking readers. Order Mountain/Home as a book or subscribe to MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing from UH Press.