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Master of the Unnoticed Story
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19041 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1991 |
3,677 Words |
| Author
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J. Martin Holman
J Martin Holman is a professor in East Asian studies at
Vanderbilt University. He is the editor and translator of
Shadows of a Sound and The Book of Masks, collections of
Hwang Sun Won's later stories by Korean author Yun Heung Gil.
His other translations include The Old Capital and Palm-of-
the-Hand Stories by Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari
Kawabata. He taught Japanese and Korean literature at
Wakayama University near Osaka, Japan. |
CONFUCIUS
Yasushi Inoue
Shincho-sha, Tokyo
1989
You might not think that a novel about the sixth-century B.C. Chinese philosopher Confucius would land on the best-seller lists in modern industrial Japan, but it has. A few months age, I walked into "Book Bahn," one of several chains of book supermarkets that have sprung up along the roadsides in Japan, glanced at the ten best-selling works of literature, and found Yasushi Inoue's latest historical novel, Koshi (Confucius), sitting in the No.1 spot--a position it has occupied for a number of weeks, ahead of four books by the current hit writer, Banana Yoshimoto.
The novel will have a familiar ring to those who have read any of Inoue's historical fiction. His previous works have sought to illuminate well-known figures in the kind of light that history seldom casts upon them. Often, an associate who saw a side of the character in question that public histories would be unlikely to chronicle narrates the story.
Confucius is narrated in the form of dialogues between a certain "Enkyo," one of the master's lesser-known disciples, and questioners who are trying to find out more about Confucius' life and teachings. Confucius is the latinized version of K'ung Fu-tzu. He was born about 551 B.C. and lived during a time of great turmoil in China, when the central government exercised little power and the country consisted of competing city-states. Little is conclusively known about Confucius' origins and early years; indeed, his life has been obscured by legends that
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