What I Am Reading Now

These are a matched set in many ways. I got them both through random browsing at Bonner's Books in Bonner's Ferry Idaho.

They are also from roughly about the Meiji Era of Japan (1868–1912). The Meiji era is a fascinating period of Japanese history as it was the end of the feudal system of the Samurai and marked Japan's entrance into the industrial revolution and an embrace of the West that reverberates throughout the subsequent history of Japan.

Japan has a special place in my heart for many reasons. It is a beautiful country. The people I have found to be generous and friendly when I have visited on business. The food is exquisite. The culture is kind and courteous if uncompromising. Their arts and crafts are some of the most talented and detailed to be found anywhere. It has always been a challenge for me to fathom it whether in business or understanding the depths of tradition, religion, and personal relationships.

The book on the left is Out of the East by Lafcadio Hearn and was published in 1895 and involves the travels of Lafcadio Hearn an Anglo-Irish writer who lived and taught English at a Japanese university during this time. It is a wide collection of folklore, travelog, and memoirs. He discusses teaching Western ideas to his students, what it is like to live in Japan at the time and tells some of the local folktales.

Perhaps it is hindsight, but I could begin to see the beginnings of the conflicts to come in the middle of the twentieth century in some of his writings.

The book opens with the following paragraph.

The hotel seemed to be a paradise, and the maids thereof celestial beings. This was because of having just fled away from one of the Open Ports, where there was an attempt to seek comfort in a European hotel, supplied with all "modern improvements." To find oneself at ease once more in a yukata (cotton summer kimono), seated upon cool, soft matting, waited upon by sweet-voiced girls, and surrounded by things of beauty, was therefore like a redemption from all the sorrows of the nineteenth century. Bamboo-shoots and lotus-bulbs were given for breakfast, and a fan from heaven for a keep-sake. The design upon that fan represented only the white rushing burst of one great wave on a beach, and sea-birds shooting in exultation through the blue overhead. But to behold it was worth all the trouble of the journey. It was a glory of light, a thunder of motion, a triumph of sea-wind, – all in one. It made one want to shout when it was looked at.

The second book is Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo by Phyllis Birnbaum and was published in 1999. However it is the story of 5 Japanese women who were born in the Meiji era and how they encountered Western modernity in what was still a very traditional culture.

It is a fascinating read so far, as it traces women who were famous for their adoption of non-traditional liberated lives primarily in the arts. The author Phyllis Birnbaum tries to look through the veil time to understand these women through various accounts of the time some more sympathetic than others. There was a great cultural upwelling of the individual at the time and some women were swept up in it to various effect on their lives.

If you are interested in Japan I recommend these unusual books for a glimpse to a different time.