Earlier this week I completed my goal of reading, reviewing, and blogging about East Asian Literature in Translation. Initially, I was interested simply in educating myself about a part of the world I knew very little about. I was (and still am) a high school English Literature and Composition teacher who happened to be teaching a significant number of students from East Asia. In my earliest conversations with East Asian students, from about eighteen years ago, I shared my curiosity about the novels they studied in school and their great books. I learned that students often thought in terms of the great classics, which they promised were very difficult to read, and if they studied anything like a novel in school, it was very likely a classic from England that they were studying in order to improve their chances of getting into an English-speaking country.

More recently, whether they are readers or not, many are aware of more 20th-century novels from their country, and quite a few are voracious in their reading appetite. Not a few Mandarin-speaking students, for example, have taught themselves Japanese in order to read Mishima, Dazai, and Kawabata. Perhaps because I talk so frequently about this project, students are more forthcoming. They will tell me that such and such a book is their mother’s favorite, or another was so popular they saw people reading it all over public transportation.

I have continued to read in this vein when and wherever possible, though I have often been so busy and stressed with schoolwork that I am having difficulty keeping some texts fresh in my head. Some that I have read, especially in the fall, I can’t recall at all. Other, more plot-driven novels, are still fresh. I hope to be posting more soon.

I also want to begin writing about topics that keep popping up in contemporary texts and in films. One of those recurring issues that East Asian writers focus attention on is the plight of the aging, not only in terms of their struggles to comprehend the world their children and children’s children inhabit, but also the world of senior care, end-of-life care, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease.

At the other end of the spectrum, I want to look more into the decline in population growth across East Asia. Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs broaches that topic directly, but issues about marriage, fertility and infertility, family and social pressure, and the expense of raising a child, figure large in many short stories of the 21st century. More and more stories focus on mature single women who chose not to marry or to enter into non-traditional relationships.

I hope I will have time to focus on these soon.

Thank you for reading!