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muckefuckI can't agree with Donald Keene's assessment of Thirst for love as "one of Mishima's best". Compared to the Sea of Fertility or much of his brilliant short fiction, it seems decidedly second-rate. In particular the bloody climax felt forced, predictable, and unnecessary. Completing it brings me one novel closer to the goal of reading all his works in English translation, but I'm not feeling nearly ambitious enough to try tackling Golden pavilion (金閣寺) for a third time.
Instead I started on Kawaguchi Matsutarō's sentimental and nostalgic しぐれ茶屋おりく, translated by Royall Tyler as Mistress Oriku.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu read it and enjoyed it. I find myself rolling my eyes at some of the more maudlin plot developments, but eating up all the Old Edo colour. (Almost literally--we've already had three discussions of different food preparations mentioned in it.) Of course, Tanizaki did this sort of thing a hundred times better (and with a fraction of the name-dropping) in his Makioka sisters (細雪), but not every American writer can be a Faulkner or a Morrison and not every Japanese writer can be a Mishima or a Tanizaki.
I don't know much about Tyler's background, but I was immensely amused to find this usage in a conversation between two restauranteurs: "I'm off to the market at three every morning....The quality goes down right away when you leave the marketing to other people." I told the GWO that that's the first time I can recall seeing that meaning of "market" in print. (I would find it completely bizarre if he didn't regularly refer to his weekly grocery shopping as "doing the marketing".)
He suggested that it might be a more common usage in the UK, but the OED claims the opposite: "now chiefly U.S.". The most recent citation is from none other than Raymond Chandler, to give you some idea how dated the expression is; the previous one is from Willa Cather. To find a British citation requires going back nearly two centuries. If this is a deliberate choice in order to make Mistress Oriku's speech sound quaint, then colour me impressed.
ETA: Incidentally, the title of Kawaguchi's work literally translates as "Drizzle Teahouse Oriku". The word for "drizzle", shigure (しぐれ), is glossed in one of my dictionaries as "a light rain shower in late fall or early winter", because that's apparently drizzle season in Japan. And, right on schedule, we had shigure while I was reading the book on Saturday and again late Sunday night. But, as usual, there's a pun here, with shigureni "drizzle-boil" being a style of cooking similar to tsukudani that is the specialty of Oriku's restaurant.
Instead I started on Kawaguchi Matsutarō's sentimental and nostalgic しぐれ茶屋おりく, translated by Royall Tyler as Mistress Oriku.
monshu read it and enjoyed it. I find myself rolling my eyes at some of the more maudlin plot developments, but eating up all the Old Edo colour. (Almost literally--we've already had three discussions of different food preparations mentioned in it.) Of course, Tanizaki did this sort of thing a hundred times better (and with a fraction of the name-dropping) in his Makioka sisters (細雪), but not every American writer can be a Faulkner or a Morrison and not every Japanese writer can be a Mishima or a Tanizaki.I don't know much about Tyler's background, but I was immensely amused to find this usage in a conversation between two restauranteurs: "I'm off to the market at three every morning....The quality goes down right away when you leave the marketing to other people." I told the GWO that that's the first time I can recall seeing that meaning of "market" in print. (I would find it completely bizarre if he didn't regularly refer to his weekly grocery shopping as "doing the marketing".)
He suggested that it might be a more common usage in the UK, but the OED claims the opposite: "now chiefly U.S.". The most recent citation is from none other than Raymond Chandler, to give you some idea how dated the expression is; the previous one is from Willa Cather. To find a British citation requires going back nearly two centuries. If this is a deliberate choice in order to make Mistress Oriku's speech sound quaint, then colour me impressed.
ETA: Incidentally, the title of Kawaguchi's work literally translates as "Drizzle Teahouse Oriku". The word for "drizzle", shigure (しぐれ), is glossed in one of my dictionaries as "a light rain shower in late fall or early winter", because that's apparently drizzle season in Japan. And, right on schedule, we had shigure while I was reading the book on Saturday and again late Sunday night. But, as usual, there's a pun here, with shigureni "drizzle-boil" being a style of cooking similar to tsukudani that is the specialty of Oriku's restaurant.
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