Books etc

Author and literary critic Ken’ichi Yoshida (1912–1977) had a privileged, international upbringing. He enrolled at King’s College, Cambridge, to read English in 1930, but left the university half a year later to devote his life to Japanese literature back in Tokyo. It was only after World War II that the author turned to English literature once again to address the ideological and literary crises in the shattered, defeated nation. Shakespeare’s Sonnets held a special place in Yoshida’s post-war output: he not only translated many of the poems but also discussed, quoted, and assimilated them in his critical and literary essays. To him, “translation is a form of criticism” (“On Translation”, 1956), and, like Oscar Wilde, he regarded “The Critic as Artist.” My essay explores Yoshida’s engagement with Shakespeare’s Sonnets against the backdrop of the rapidly democratizing Japanese society of the late 1940s through the 60s. Yoshida’s idiosyncratic writing style was often criticized as “recondite” and “incomprehensible,” but his Sonnets translation exerted significant influence over distinguished contemporary poets, such as Hiroshi Yoshino (1926–2014) and Shuntaro Tanikawa (1931–). My essay examines how Yoshida’s reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets afforded him the insight into, and visions for, the literature and society of post-war Japan .

When The Merchant of Venice was first introduced to Japan in the early years of the Meiji period, an overwhelming majority of the readers and members of the audience had not even heard the word Jew, let alone met one in the flesh. Japan had only recently (1854) abandoned its isolationist foreign policy that had severely limited relations with other countries and banned nearly all foreign nationals from entering the country for 265 years. James Shapiro has shown convincingly that, in England, Jews kept invoking cultural insecurities even after the Expulsion in 1290, and that the anxiety they generated directly influenced Shakespeare's Jewish characters.2 Even the brilliant Columbia professor, however, would have difficulty locating a Jewish question in Japan at the time of the Meiji Restoration. In fact, it was Shakespeare's Venetian comedy that would help frame that question in Japanese minds.