The Kiso Road: The Life and Times of Shimazaki Toson by William E. Naff
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2 comments:
Well, there's a coincidence: I'm just embarking on - the verb is deliberately chosen, given the book's bulk freighter-like heft - Shimazaki Toson's "Before the Dawn", in William Naff's excellent translation, of course. Would be interested to see a review of "The Life and Times" in due course....
Yeah, I enjoyed it, and as is often the case with critical biographies, I came away liking Toson a lot less, as a person anyway.
I especially enjoyed it because I am quite familiar with all the locations, especially the Road itself. I wish more of his work was in English since his complete works are an autobiography of sorts, but I'm not going to tackle that job.
And I loved "Before the Dawn," though more as a historian than as a writer. It is a lot of work getting through that book, but one comes away far richer for it. A companion volume of sorts is "Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912 by Donald Keene".
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