Not a Song Like Any Other: An Anthology of Writings by Mori Ogai

by Ōgai Mori

The literary writings of Mori Ōgai (1862-1922), one of the giant figures of the Meiji period, have become increasingly well known to readers of English through a number of recent translations of his novels and short stories. Ōgai was more than a writer of fiction, however. He has long been regarded in Japan as one of the most influential intellectual and artistic figures of his period, possessing a wide range of enthusiasms and concerns, many developed through his early European experiences.

Not a Song Like Any Other attempts to reveal the full range of Ōgai’s creative endeavor, providing trenchant examples of his remarkable range, from dramatist and storyteller to poet and polemicist, all translated into English for the first time. The first of seven parts, “The Author Himself,” offers a variety of self portraits and other insights into Ōgai’s character through his essays―laconic, ironic, detached―written over the course of his career. “Mori Ōgai in Germany” reveals his responses to living in Germany in the 1880s and seeing for the first time how his country was being interpreted from the outside. It includes his celebrated and spirited defense of his country, originally published in a German newspaper. “Mori Ōgai and the World of Politics” relates his uneasy reactions to Japanese society at a later phase in his career. The fourth section provides some of the first information available in English concerning his lifelong interest in painting and other aspects of the visual arts in the Japan of his day. Ōgai’s theatrical experiments are briefly chronicled in Part 5. “Four Unusual Stories” offers new evidence of the range of the writer’s interests and ambitions. The final section includes some of the first translations of Ōgai’s poetry available in English.

Richard Bowring, Sarah Cox, Sanford Goldstein, Andrew Hall, Mikiko Hirayama, Helen Hopper, Marvin Marcus, Keiko McDonald, J. Thomas Rimer, Hiroaki Sato, William J. Tyler.

Genres: Japanese Literature

328 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 2004

About the author

Mori Ōgai, pseudonym of Mori Rintarō (born February 17, 1862, Tsuwano, Japan—died July 9, 1922, Tokyo), one of the creators of modern Japanese literature.

The son of a physician of the aristocratic warrior (samurai) class, Mori Ōgai studied medicine, at first in Tokyo and from 1884 to 1888 in Germany. In 1890 he published the story “Maihime” (“The Dancing Girl”), an account closely based on his own experience of an unhappy attachment between a German girl and a Japanese student in Berlin. It represented a marked departure from the impersonal fiction of preceding generations and initiated a vogue for autobiographical revelations among Japanese writers. Ōgai’s most popular novel, Gan (1911–13; part translation: The Wild Goose), is the story of the undeclared love of a moneylender’s mistress for a medical student who passes by her house each day. Ōgai also translated Hans Christian Andersen’s autobiographical novel Improvisatoren.

In 1912 Ōgai was profoundly moved by the suicide of General Nogi Maresuke, following the death of the emperor Meiji, and he turned to historical fiction depicting the samurai code. The heroes of several works are warriors who, like General Nogi, commit suicide in order to follow their masters to the grave. Despite his early confessional writings, Ōgai came to share with his samurai heroes a reluctance to dwell on emotions. His detachment made his later works seem cold, but their strength and integrity were strikingly close to the samurai ideals he so admired.

Reviews

[Anima]

‘OUR PAST MAY be likened to food that has been con sumed. When fully digested, it becomes the foundation for sustaining life. In such a manner, our prior experiences have made us what we are and form the very basis for what we will become. But none of us — especially those who lead vigorous lives — has the luxury of lingering over meals. I happen to be a busy person. I have precious little time to think about the life I used to lead. Perhaps when I grow older, when the present will have become a void and the future will be like the rarefied air inside a bell jar, I may well look back upon my past. But such an eventuality seems quite far off.
[...]
What was life like as a four teen -year-old? My memory is terribly vague. Since I tend to focus on matters of pressing concern, my recollection of extraneous things is unreliable in the extreme. Hence what I recall of my past has been reduced to a grayish blur. Although not entirely extinguished, the memories are hidden away in the deepest recesses of the psychic storehouse. Getting at them is no easy matter.‘

[...] ‘Writers are destined to be buried. They cannot escape the inevitable fading away. It's only a question of time — it may take a century, a decade, a year and a half. Some boldly reject the notion, citing the example, say, of China's immortal literary tradition. A dubious claim. Others hold that a writer's reputation is fixed for all time at the moment the coffin is sealed shut. But ones name does not in fact endure. Goethe's critique of Stendhal, for instance, remains for all to see in his collected works, together with his repeated misspellings of the man's name. Yet Stendhal's time would come. He would be resurrected and given new life. Then there is the case ...’

[Dcbruhbruh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice collection of writings of Mori Ogai, mostly first time english translations, for which this book is a commendable effort