Short Stories from Asia: China and Japan

About this course:

In this course, we read short stories from China and Japan. The stories from China illuminate modern Chinese life during its years of cultural and political upheaval, including Wang Anyi’s “The Destination,” Lu Wenfu’s “The Man from a Peddler’s Family,” and traditional Chinese life revealed through time-honored storytelling, including “Wine and Dumplings,” a twelfth-century detective story. The stories from Japan describe and critique modern Japanese life, including Kobo Abe’s “The Magic Chalk,” a work of realism and disturbing fantasy, and “Yukio Mishima’s “Act of Worship,” a story that sets estranged Japanese life against an idealized Japanese past. As David Damrosch reminds us, “Reading a work from a different place and time involves a back-and-forth movement between the familiar and the unfamiliar. A view of the world is always a view from wherever we are, and we inevitably filter what we read through our own experience. But if we don’t impose our expectations onto the new work, its distinctive qualities will enlarge our field of vision.”