Volume 32, Number 14 · September 26, 1985
'Rabu' Conquers All
By Ian Buruma
Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era Vol. I: Fiction
by Donald Keene
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1327 pp., $60.00
Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era Vol. II: Poetry, Drama, Criticism
by Donald Keene
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 685 pp., $40.00
Listening to the anguished cries going up in Washington these days of Japanese might wiping out American industries, it seems almost unbelievable that a little over a century ago Japan was a wholly traditional society living in more or less splendid isolation from the rest of the world. Japanese culture, to a large extent, was a 'world within walls'—the apt title of Professor Keene's study, published nine years ago, of premodern Japanese literature. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was a decadent world and the walls were rapidly crumbling, but it was a self-contained little universe yet to be directly confronted with the West, then at the peak of its power. The Industrial Revolution was still distant thunder to the Japanese, most of whom, especially in the rural areas, were living in the economic middle ages.
Review, 3895 words
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