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March 25, 2005My faith in retail bookstores is slightly revived!
I had to go and grab "The Tale of Genji" in all of its 1,120-page, translated glory this afternoon from the local Bookstar. I'd never actually stopped in before, though, so it took a few times up and down Ventura Boulevard before I spotted it, which was a right pain in the arse. Luckily, the streets of L.A. took pity on me and opened up curbside parking for me right in front of the store just as I was pulling up--and with 1:25 left on the meter, at that.
I had a delightful conversation, albeit brief, with the bookseller who rang me up, a middle-aged African-American woman dressed in warm autumn colors and a matching headwrap. She'd noticed that "The Tale of Genji" had been put on reserve earlier in the day, and she told me how much she's been meaning to read it. She ticked off the three English translations of it most widely known--Waley (the first, much shorter translation, which I kept encountering in used book stores), Seidensticker, and Tyler (the most recent, which is what I bought today)--and enumerated their various strengths and weaknesses. She asked what had brought me to "The Tale of Genji," and when I told her about my upcoming class, her excitement was genuine. I ticked off some of the reading list at her insistence. Abe Kobo, Mori Ogai, "The Tale of the Heike," she knew 'em all--and probably would have known the rest of the authors and titles, too, whose names escaped me.
It was wonderful to encounter somebody working at a big chain bookstore whose love of the merchandise was so obvious. I worked at a Barnes & Noble during the Christmas/Hanukah season one year, and it was disheartening to see how many of the employees treated their job like any other position in retail. I had expected--rather idealistically, as I came to realize--that a bookstore would attract and subsequently hire book-lovers. There were those sorts among them, but for many of them (especially among the younger crowd), it was simply a job. They could have been selling clothes, or Ginsu knives, or car parts. It was all the same to them.
I don't have a whole lot of use for stores that sell new books--I know I can usually find the same thing for much less, if I'm patient, and so I'm just to chintzy to cough up the dough for a new copy. However, if I do find myself needing to shop for new books from now on, I'm hitting that Bookstar.
(And speaking of used books, I snapped up a signed copy of Harlan Ellison's "Angry Candy" for a measly $10 the other day. Score!)
Posted by patrick at March 25, 2005 02:26 PM
CommentsOoh! Ooh! Which Abe Kobo book(s)? Who else are you reading? Masuji Ibuse? Murakami Haruki? What's the theme of the class?
Note: Japanese literature is one of my favorite things, and it dominated my upper-division years at UCR.
Posted by: Mad Monarch Voards at August 25, 2005 02:03 PM
We're basically taking a general look at Japanese literature in translation, skipping over the Edo period:
"Kojiki"; "The Tale of Genji" (trans. Tyler); "Classical Japanese Proce: An Anthology" (ed. McCullough); "Tale of the Heike" (trans. McCullough); "Tales of Times Now Past" (trans. Ury); "20 Plays of the Noh Theater" (trans. Keene); "Rashomon and Other Stories," by Akutagawa Ryunosuke; "Kokoro and Selected Essays," by Natsume Soseki; "Vita Sexualis," by Mori Ogai; "Naomi," by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro; "Silence," by Endo Shusaku; "Snow Country," by Kawabata Yasunari; "Confessions of a Mask," by Mishima Yukio; "The Waiting Years," by Enchi Fumiko; "The Silent Cry," by Oe Kenzaburo; "The Doctor's Wife," by Ariyoshi Sawako; "Return to Tsugaru," by Dazai Osamu; "In the Shade of Spring Leaves," by Higuchi Ichiyou; "Inter Ice Age Four," by Abe Kobo
Posted by: Patrick at August 25, 2005 02:04 PM
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