Following yesterday’s reading, I continued to research the book Ugetsu Monogatari or “Tales of Moonlight and Rain”, published in 1776 by Japanese author Ueda Akinari and translated into English by Anthony H Chambers.
Found an old review by English novelist James Lasdun via The Guardian, titled “Houses of the Dead”. In Lasdun’s view, part of the allure of Akinari’s stories derives from the sense “of the occult functioning not merely as a source of gratuitous chills but also as a way of thinking about the tensions of ordinary human life”. In other words, the supernatural element “while providing a nice frisson, serves also as a means of extending the underlying emotional preoccupations”.
Unsure what this means, I tried to track down a copy of the book. Everything I could find online is expensive, like US$30 or more…
Good news is, I eventually found a copy of “Tales of Moonlight and Rain” via our good old State Library Victoria, which is available for reading online. Even better, SLV has three different English translations of Akinari’s book, by Leon Zolbrod (1974) and Kengi Hamada (1972) in addition to Chambers (2008).
(Day 50 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 