Matthew Fraleigh
Assistant Professor of East Asian Literature and Culture at Brandeis University

New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West:
Narushima Ryūhoku Reports from Home and Abroad (Cornell East Asia Series)

Matthew Fraleigh’s carefully annotated translations of Narushima Ryūhoku’s (1837 – 1884) New Chronicles of Yanagibashi (Ryūkyō shinshi) and Diary of a Joukeerney to the West (Kōsei nichijō) help us appreciate the pivotal position of Ryūhoku occupied as someone who bridged the literary worlds of both Edo and Meiji. The first of these two translations presents Ryūhoku’s nuanced, often satirical contemplation of Yanagibashi, one of Tokyo’s celebrated entertainment districts that flourished and faded during the tumultuous 1850s – 1870s. Fraleigh masterfully preserves the linguistic playfulness of the text by providing translations of the colloquial glosses that Ryūhoku added to his Chinese prose. At a time when Japanese writing in various sinocentric styles reached a brilliant final flowering before giving way to what we now call “modern Japanese,” this text, as well as the poetry-filled Diary of a Journey to the West that records the author’s trip around the world in 1872 to 1873, show Ryūhoku’s creative struggle to find the proper language with which to capture the harmony and dissonance of tradition and modernity in their frenzied dance with each other. Fortunately for the reader, Ryūhoku polyphonic voice as a penetrating critic, a budding journalist, a faithful chronicler, and as a lyrical poet is appropriately matched by Fraleigh’s boundless erudition and sensitivity to style.

J. Keith Vincent
Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at Boston University

The Food Demon (in A Riot of Goldfish, Hesperus Worldwide) J. Keith Vincent’s translation of Okamoto Kanoko’s (1889 – 1939) The Food Demon (Shokuma, 1941) successfully captures the author’s many-layered portrait of a complicated “sensei” of cuisine, a man whose disdain for others finds expression in the perfection of his culinary taste and performance as a cook. The richness of Okamoto’s insistent prose is well matched in the sureness of Vincent’s well- measured rhythms and melodic phrasing. This collection also contains the eponymous A Riot of Goldfish (Kingyo ryōran, 1937), which contains one of the most powerful lyrical moments in all of Japanese literature. “How fresh and forgiving was the breath of the trees and the grasses. Green, madder, orange, and yellow, each and every cluster of leaves swelled and seemed to gasp with a surfeit of life. The disheveled grasses lightly shook off beads of dew and rearranged themselves luxuriantly like bosoms standing to attention. Wherever Mataichih bent his ear to listen, there was the babbling sound of water, and the echo of this hastily improvised mountain steam gave a pulse of movement to the landscape before his eyes.” This story of the unrequited love and madness of a goldfish breeder is well rendered in the measured richness of Vincent’s prose.

The 2011-2012 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prizes for the Translation of Japanese Literature were presented at an awards ceremony held at Columbia University on April 27th, 2012.