Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World by Arthur M. Mitchell (review)

constellation of authorial, commercial, and readerly concerns—even if it means readjusting, or even scrapping altogether, our conceptions of what the terms “novel” and “fiction” signify in this context. In the end, evaluating a translation like this entails an irreducibly subjective and even emotional dimension. During the six weeks I was reading An Ill-Considered Jest, I looked forward to coming home at night and finding it on my bedside, and it served as a stalwart and dependable comrade on my first postpandemic excursions to conferences and lectures where, for the first time in over two years, I gathered with colleagues in person with a renewed sense of appreciation for the pleasures of our profession. If this sounds sentimental, I make no apologies. As Bakin knew well, literary careers are inaugurated via sentimental encounters with individual texts, and if this translation engenders a similar reaction among my students, it will have done our field a deep service by introducing a new generation to the challenges and joys of early modern Japanese narrative. Not only that, it will have done so in a way that presents Hakkenden on its own narratological terms, rather than attempting to squeeze it into a nineteenth-century European realist mold. I eagerly await the second installment and wish its translator well: the road to Awa is long and hard, and the going will not be easy.