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2 comments about Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life.

1. Not to be confused with Natsume Soseki's novel by the same title, Lafcadio Hearn's "Kokoro" is a magnificent collection of essays, vignettes, memoirs, and meditations on Japan in the 1890's. Very much a product of the mid-Meiji period, these masterfully-written little literary pieces are nonetheless timeless. Each piece is quite different from the rest, and yet almost all of them manage to start from everyday incidents or obvious observations and gradually spiral inwards to some deeply moving and startling insight into Japanese attitudes, values, and worldviews; more than once this seemingly methodless method allows Hearn to share with the reader certain common opinions and normal spiritual orientations held by average Japanese folks--the kinds of things usually taken for granted and so unarticulated, hence least amenable to documentation and scholarship (especially of the time, but even today). And Hearn does all this with an unpretentious erudition and an understated and balanced sympathy for his subject that, along with his literary flair for wonderfully clear and flowing prose, places his writings here in a category far above the rest. With him we can find none of the unintentional strains of condescension and orientalism so typical of folklore and religious anthropology, for while he's looking with the surprised gaze of the outsider with one eye, his other eye is that of the insider feeling very much at home where he is. The resulting view is visionary--but in subdued and shadowy tones.
   
   Appendix on an Appendix: in addition to the fifteen excellent essays forming the main body of "Kokoro", there's an extensive appendix featuring Hearn's translations of three popular folk ballads: "The Ballad of Shuntoku-Maru", "The Ballad of Oguri Hangwan" and "The Ballad of O-Shichi, the Daughter of the Yaoya". These are fascinating on a number of levels. They provide a tantalizingly fleeting glimpse of plebian drama, remarkable in its very lack of remarkableness. There's a certain sociological angle, as the versions of these oral ballads collected and translated by Hearn are those recited by mountain outcastes in the area of today's Shimane Prefecture. Religiously the first two ballads are key in understanding popular attitudes concerning pilgrimage in Japan--the first demonstrating a creepy (almost voodoo) edge in Kannon faith at Kiyomizudera Temple, the second delightfully exaggerating the rejuvenating benefits of Kumano and its sacred hot springs. Meanwhile, the third ballad is a straightforwardly melodramatic retelling of a true story better known to us today in a more refined and literary version as found in the novelist Saikaku's "Five Women Who Loved Love" of 1686.



2. "Kokoro" is a difficult word to translate from Japanese to English. Heart, Spirit, Way of Being...it is all of these things. Rather than attempt a direct translation, Lafcadio Hearn offers a selection of stories focusing on Japanese inner life, so that by the end you will understand kokoro.

   The stories follow Hearn's particular interests of Japanese folklore and the vanishing culture of which he found himself a part in post-Meji Japan. Each story is a slice of life focusing on Japanese character, morals and feelings. This is what the Japanese people care about, what they think is important, what is inside.

   The selected tales are non-judgmental and non-orientalist. This is no attempt to explain or highlight the "strange" Japanese, but merely a record and an illumination, in the best sense of the term.

   The collected stories:

   "At a Railway Station"
   "The Genius of Japanese Civilization"
   "A Street Singer"
   "From a Traveling Diary"
   "The Nun of the Temple of Amida"
   "After the War"
   "Haru"
   "A Glimpse of Tendencies"
   "By Force of Karma"
   "A Conservative"
   "In the Twilight of the Gods"
   "The Idea of Pre-Exsistance"
   "In Cholera Time"
   "Some Thoughts about Ancestor Worship"
   "Kimiko"

5 comments about Three came home (MB).

1. After seeing the 1950 Claudette Colbert film version of this book, I was interested in reading the memoir on which the film was based. Agnes Keith was married to a British government officer when the Japanese took Indonesia during the early days of World War II. Keith and her toddler son were taken to a POW camp; her husband spent the rest of the war in a men's camp under even worse conditions. Keith's memoir describes the starvation, the cruelty, the inhumane conditions, disease, torture, hard labor and the women's superhuman struggles to keep their children alive and relatively healthy. The story is not only about survival, but about the power of love. In the book an occasional racist remark, typical of the times, creeps in, but she also occasionally inserts insights into the humanity found even in some of her captors, and certainly in the Indonesian people. The book ends with little bitterness, and primarily a plea for peace. The film was remarkably faithful to the book, sanitizing and softening some details because film audiences weren't expected to see Claudette Colbert fighting rats, living in abject filth, or dropping down to 80 pounds. The film is still very powerful; the book even more so. This is a well-bound trade paperback edition.



2. This is one of the best written book I have ever read. Very emotional A DEFINATE MUST READ BOOK



3. This book contains the wartime memoirs of Agnes Keith. In 1939, Keith published a book "Land Beneath the Wind," describing her life as the wife of a British colonial official in Northern Borneo. She and her husband Harry were on home leave in North America in 1939 when she finished writing the book. However, Harry was called back early to Borneo from his leave because of the war clouds on the horizon. Agnes, who was pregnant, soon followed, and several months later, gave birth to their son George in Sandakan. Although there had been talk of evacuating women and children from colonial outposts in the Pacific, no orders came through for evacuation before the Japanese invasion, and Agnes refused to leave Harry behind voluntarily. Thus, when the Japanese arrived, all three Keiths were still in Sandakan, and were soon interned in prisoners' camps for the duration of the war. In this book, Keith recounts the stories of how she, George, and Harry survived life in the camps. Her tale was so remarkable that it was made into a movie shortly after the war.
   
   Readers of Keith's earlier book will be stunned at the change in tone of her writing. In Land Beneath the Wind, Keith writes with an airy, scattered-brained style, almost as if she were afraid that otherwise, she would be taken too seriously. Indeed, it was perhaps her humor itself that made her first book popular. But the light tone is gone completely from this book. The nightmare of the prison camps, where random beatings were a certainty, but food was often unattainable, and hygiene nonexistent, took away her carefree nature and matured her overnight beyond her years. For more than three years, she struggled daily to find any kind of food for George, from wormy rice to just plain worms. This woman of colonial privilege traded family heirloom jewelry for a chicken, and learned to hoard night soil for use as fertilizer.
   
   From the start, the Japanese camp leader recognized her as a special prisoner, because he had read Land Beneath the Wind. He required her to keep a journal of her camp adventures for future publication to show how "humane" the Japanese treatment of prisoners had been. So every day, after she completed her required prison work, she had to write for this commander about how wonderful camp life was. When that was finished, she secretly wrote up notes describing what life was really like, and hid them in cans buried under their huts or in the latrines. The most amazing part of her experience is not only that she and George and Harry survived at all, but that through it all, she managed to come away from the camps without blind hatred for the Japanese. She recognized that some of the prison guards were evil, but that many couldn't help but obey their superiors. The years of captivity for the Keiths robbed them of their youth, their health, and the better part of George's childhood, but Agnes finds fault not with Japanese people, but rather with the idea of war itself.



4. Three Came Home is a well-written, true story of a woman and her son's internment in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Borneo during WWII. Agnes Newton Keith creates a vivid portrait of the conditions under which the prisoners lived and of their day to day lives. She also makes it clear that people are not inherently good or bad; they are often victims of circumstances. Her love for her son and hope that they will be reunited with her husband keep her going and morally-centred. An absolutely excellent book!



5. As much as "Three Came Home" is a story of war, it is a story of love. Mrs. Keith's love for her husband and son are paralleled with her hatred of internment. She balances the good in people, even the enemy, with the bad. The clear message is that war is what makes people bad. I enjoyed this book. It is beautifully written, with every sentence eliciting some kind of emotion in the reader. Mrs. Keith is an admirable woman for her literary accomplishments and her ability to share her experiences on a very personal level.

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1 comments about Death's Railway: A Merchant Mariner POW on the River Kwai.

1. I was one of the first individuals to buy this book as I couldn't wait for it's publication. I just finished reading it and I must say that the author again has written a masterpiece. Mr. Reminick, thanks again for your incisive prose and inside view of history. Love it.

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2 comments about Wake Up, America: My Four Years in Hell.

1. America defense forces has become weak. We cannot put our troups in Iraq and Korea at the same time. We have cut our defenses back to far. There are so many potential hot spots in the Middle East and Central Asia in the next decade that we must return to strength. A must to read. Lets Wake Up America!



2. The book keeps you going and you will find that you will not lay it down. A side to WW-II I have never read before. There is a lesson in the book as to why America should wake up and keep our military strong. I never realized the extent of suffering we asked our men(boys) to suffer, fighting a ruthless enemy without supplies and equipment. The book has made me aware of how gratefull we need to be of our fighting men. A must to read. Kenneth Gatzke