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ADAPTATIONS OF WESTERN LITERATURE IN MEIJI JAPAN. By J. Scott Miller. New York: Global Publishing at St. Martin's Press. 2002. x, 180 pp. (Illustrations.) US$45.00, doth. ISBN 0-312-23995-5.
A translation failing to achieve literalness, Vladimir Nabokov once quipped, sinks to the level of imitation, adaptations or parody. As a phenomenon of Meiji Japan, however, the second of these was favoured over close translation (hon'yaku), and was practically ubiquitous: in just the first two decades of the Meiji period, nearly seventy literary adaptations (hon'anmono) of Western romances and dime novels appeared in books, newspapers and storytelling halls, not to mention on stage. By introducing foreign narrative and visual conventions into the popular imagination, the adaptation helped demystify the West after centuries of official isolation. Furthermore, its study today can provide cultural historians and literary comparatists alike with a useful mirror reflecting Meiji Japanese anxieties, misperceptions and fantasies of that inscrutable Western Other.
Or so Scott Miller argues in this engaging, if...