The public is invited to the following lecture. A 1,000 yen donation from non-members would be appreciated, but is not required.
Place: International House of Japan, 5-11-16 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106--0032 (Roppongi Station, Hibiya line).
Information: Please make reservations in advance by calling the Program Department, (03) 3470-3211 between 9:00 and 17:00, Mondays to Fridays.
We are happy to announce that this month's meeting will be a joint meeting with International House (Kokusai Bunka Kaikan). Please note that it will begin at the later time of 7:00 p.m. As the seating of the lecture hall is limited, International House has stressed that all those wishing to attend should make reservations in advance. Please call the Program Department at (03) 3470-3211 between 9:00 and 17:00, Mondays to Fridays.
Dr. Yamanouchi has been professor of English at Japan Women's University since his retirement from the University of Tokyo in 1995. In 1975 he received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge with a dissertation on "The Mind's Abyss: A Study of Melancholy and Associated States in Some Late-Eighteenth-Century Writers, and in Wordsworth and Coleridge". During the extended period of his stay in Cambridge he also taught Japanese as Lector in the Faculty of Oriental Studies and he gave a series of lectures on Japanese literature, which was published as A Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1978; later translated into Romanian). Having been made Honorary Professor at the Centre for British and Comparative Cultural Studies in the University of Warwick in 1995, he is trying to accommodate traditional English Studies to British Cultural Studies to meet the needs of the students at his home university.
Of the paper that he will read to us, Dr. Yamanouchi writes that on the occasion of being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994, Kenzaburo Oe announced that he would write no more novels in future but would concentrate on philosophical exploration, re-reading Spinoza in particular. Having said that, he went over to the United States in the following year to teach at Princeton University. To the delight of his readers, however, his announcement that he would give up writing novels proved untrue when he published two thick volumes of Somersault in 1999. To some extent his new work is a sequel to his previous one, The Flaming Green Tree, a trilogy completed and published in 1995. His major concern in that work was with "the matter of soul," a theme which is also dealt with in Somersault. Could there be salvation for mankind in this age in which it is not at all easy to attain certitude of faith in the midst of conflicting values? Dr. Yamanouchi will try to find answers to this question by closely reading Oe's new novel as well as by tracing the ideas expressed in his occasional writings for the media.
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 8", October 2000, compiled by Prof. Hugh E. Wilkinson and Mrs. Doreen Simmons.
Return to the ASJ 2000 lecture schedule