Low Down

      Yuriko Miyamoto represents a genre that is well-known in Poland and West block countries – called and acknowledged as proletarian literature. At the very beginning she was very fortunate, her father, a Cambridge professor of architecture at Tokyo Imperial University made her education granted, well-foregrounded. The personal life upheavals and changes occurring in Japan pushed her toward socialism and feminist movements. Her short stories were full of adjectives and metaphors, she was a very good student at Columbia University where she had her internship, but studying in the USA was not her one and only entrepreneurship, she went to Russia, in Moscow she studied Russian culture and literature, and at the same time became interested in Marxism and socialism, she edited Marxist journal and was acknowledged as a main representative of 1 proletarian literature in Japan.   Miyamoto was a harsh opponent of a dictatorship, the literature of per-war period d...

Natsume Soseki wrote an amusing novel, at first sight it appears to be a frivolous story based on his personal experience. Truly it is, yet, not that frivolous and unbiased as one may think. The literary genre portrayed in the novel is morality discourse mingled with  humor  and grotesque. Soseki's experience as a teacher was described in the novel, it was his loneliness, homesick feelings, he was missing Tokyo, his surroundings. On the other hand his life in Matsuyama, on the island of Shikoku was filled with overwhelming longing. The small, picturesque island is an idyllic place, Botchan perceives it as backward and barbaric, uncivilized. The basic, archaic Japanese values are opposite to new, modern, westernized intellectualism, which are described with a hind of sarcasm and irony, for that reason the character of the novel is a bit tart. The position of the match teacher is not an easy task, shortly after his arrival he knows that he will be in the center of spinning ...

Bushido and its role in Japanese culture intrigued for centuries. All along the way it underwent changes, nonetheless, its core-stone role is still the same. The verbatim meaning is “the way of the warrior”. Bushido determined the way a samurai, warriors were about to behave, it literally described the life of the warriors and the samurai. Not everyone agrees, yet, Bushido might be loosely combined to well-known  chivalry  code. This modern notion concentrates on values and virtues, moral sets of how to behave and how to live. The most important and  restrictive  values were of frugality – the samurai and the warrior, both, were ordered to be prudent, not prone to extravagance, loyalty was another one, as well as, martial arts, the honor and sense of responsibility till the death. Noe- Confucianism  brought Bushido to life, Japan was a very tranquil country at that time, marked by Edo period, known as Tokugawa period, at the same time. It must be underlined...