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What to Read...

By Recent Speakers at I.U.

Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China
Wang Ping
(Anchor Books, 2002)

When I first read the book Aching for Beauty, I was struck by the author's story of her own desire to have her foot bound when she was nine. That was 1966, the beginning year of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. This grasped my full attention because as someone who also grew up during that time in history, I thought it must be a very unique individual who would dare to embrace such desire. Young generations are implanted with ideas of what's new and what's old, the ultimate dichotomy of good and evil. We were new citizens who must abandon all of the old feudal ideas, and footbinding, the distorting of girls' feet, was the evil of all evils, even though we didn't know why. The author, Wang Ping, who has her Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University and teaches creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul Minnesota, was free spirited in her formative years during that repressive era.

It was all the more pleasing to meet with her in person in early March when she came to Bloomington to read her poems and present her thoughts. After talking to her, I was impressed with her frankness and the direct impact of her American experiences. She indeed is a cultural explorer of her past, a Chinese part that defines our roots.

Wang Ping's book, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, is an exquisite pursuit of pain, body, myth, sex, beauty and femininity. Through abundant literary citations and analysis from Chinese erotic classics such as the Golden Lotus, The Romance of the Western Chamber, and the Three-Inch Golden Lotus, we hear murmurs of our distant female ancestors, their sorrows, tears and pride. Her richly documented writing takes us back to the 12th century when this painful practice originated, and the 13th century when the Mongol rulers particularly encouraged the spread of footbinding. She translated many primary sources that depict young girls' screams of pain and male companions' admiration of the "lotus," the tiny feet. Readers will gain insights about the pain-infested culture and its sublimation in poetry and verse. Along the way, you will enjoy Wang Ping's literary accomplishment as her words flow poetically.

For me, this is a cultural lesson that was long overdue.

During the Cultural Revolution, girls in my neighborhood, who were Red Guards at 14 or 15 years of age, proudly compared their feet with each other to see who has the largest, so that they could claim there were no feudal crumbs in their thoughts. Even so, they bound their breasts with layers and layers of cloth so that they could have a gender-neutral appearance. Reading Wang Ping's footbinding book brought back my long-forgotten childhood memories. Reviewed by Liana Zhou, Head of the Library, Kinsey Institute.

 

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Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words
Jay Rubin
Harvill Press

Jay Rubin, Harvard professor of Japanese literature and author of Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, begins his book about the writing career of Haruki Murakami with a confession. "I might as well admit it from the start: I am a Haruki Murakami fan." Perhaps he is worried that his admiration for the man and his writing will somehow color the analysis that follows. While it is unusual to have such a comprehensive analysis of a contemporary writer by someone who also happens to be the writer's friend, Rubin is able to maintain a balanced approach to his analysis. The book is by and large chronological, taking us through Murakami's work from the first short stories to after the quake. Interspersed are brief glimpses of Murakami the man. Along the way, Rubin includes translated passages and in some cases entire stories that are new to English readers of Murakami. This mixture of academic examination, personal anecdote, snapshots of Murakami's life, and passages and stories translated in their entirety make Rubin's look at Murakami and his works truly unique.

Critics have always been divided as to whether we should take Murakami seriously. Rubin explains, "[Critic Masao] Miyoshi regards Murakami as a cynical entrepreneur who never wrote a word out of such old fashioned motives as inspiration or inner impulse. To frighten off skittish academics who might be tempted to take Murakami seriously, he warns, 'only a very few would be silly enough to get interested in deep reading.'" Rubin is not afraid to be one of those proud, silly few, and the result is a valuable study of the life and works of Haruki Murakami.

Rubin ends this work with two important appendices -- a detailed bibliography of works by and about Haruki Murakami and an interesting discussion of issues of translation. Any close look at the works of Haruki Murakami is bound to elicit discussions on issues of translation. Murakami has been accused of writing awkward Japanese so that it will translate easily into English, and indeed when he is not producing fiction, he is translating one of many American authors, such as Raymond Carver, John Updike, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote, that he has helped make famous in Japan. This English-sounding Japanese is the foundation for Murakami's writing style. "Murakami's style strikes the Japanese reader as fresh and new because it often reads like it is translated from English…Its American flavor is subtle and feels both foreign and natural at the same time" (Rubin, 288). When Rubin talked about this work during his colloquium lecture on April 4, 2003, he admitted that one of the biggest challenges to translating Murakami is communicating this style. This thought is echoed in his book: "Paradoxically, the closeness of Murakami's style to English can itself pose problems for a translator trying to translate it 'back' into English; the single most important quality that makes his style fresh and enjoyable in Japanese is what is lost in translation" (Rubin, 289). With Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, Rubin allows English-speaking readers to have a fascinating glimpse into the world of modern translation and the most comprehensive view of the works of Murakami to date. Reviewed by Susan Furukawa

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A Web Resource from the Yale University Center for the Study of Globalization

In both the academy and society at large, there has been intense debate regarding the increased interconnectedness of individuals, institutions, and nations throughout the world. Nayan Chanda of Yale University, the Spring Freeman Journalism Speaker at I.U. Bloomington, wanted to contribute to the understanding of globalization, so he created Yale Global Online (URL: www.yaleglobal.yale.edu). This flagship publication of the Center for the Study of Globalization brings together ideas from the academy and events reported in the news together to make sense of an increasingly interconnected and complex world.

Yale Global Online is a unique resource for individual to utilize. Bringing together information impacting a worldwide audience and not an immediate one, this online publication speaks equally well to the corporate manager, the public intellectual and the interested citizen. From first look, the publication is a mass of topical information that shares no coherence. Yet, in this respect the reader is exposed to the nature of a globalizing world. Yale Global Online presents information regarding our world where boundaries blur, distinctions disappear, and definitions are hard to come by.

This is a highly recommended resource for individuals interested in worldwide processes. The only caveat is that Yale Global Online is a synthesis of information that provides for a preliminary investigation of globalization only. Yet, as an online resource, Yale Global Online is an excellent source of information and is highly recommended, especially for use in the classroom and inside international outreach programs. Reviewed by Jeffrey Payne.

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