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Warm and Rainy Wednesday Reading
Mar. 31st, 2021 11:24 pmAm attempting to fix sleeping schedule. Ended up sleeping for 12 hours straight. Brain, please.
Finished: The World of the Shining Prince. Ultimately worth reading, if you can get past the author's English biases and small amounts of repetition (we got it the first time when you called the Heian woman's world a twilight one, geez). Instead of a re-release with mentor stanning tacked on to the beginning, I would've preferred an updated version to remove the stupid comments and obviously wrong historical bits like the central/south Americans not knowing about the wheel.
I did get a laugh out of a page near the end, where he writes that Murasaki Shikibu would no sooner have written about a peasant than a Western author would write from the perspective of a horse or a pig. Gee, I wonder if there are any famous works of English-language literature that fit that description?
Currently Reading: Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan. It's a more academic book than the one above and also more repetitive - if I have to read about 'dutiful daughters' and the way parents, prostitutes, and officials used the concept of filial piety one more time I feel like I'm going to throw something. That said, it's an interesting look at prostitution in a very different cultural setting (Edo-period Japan) than I'm used to seeing it discussed; I knew a little bit, but this has a lot more detail and context. The author's main arguments so far are that in the Edo period, distinctions were newly drawn between 'prostitutes' and 'other women', or at least 'wives' and 'other women (whose bodies and labor can be sold to others)', and that moralizing attitudes towards the sex trade in the later part of the Edo period came about not because anyone cared that women were having sex, but because of a growing economic anxiety around women working outside the home and becoming economically independent even though most female sex workers were not independent or freelancing at all. So far, the chapter on Nagasaki was the most interesting, because there women remained much more embedded in their communities (and might also be allowed to see foreigners) than in the famous Yoshiwara of Edo.
Reading Next: IDK, but probably fiction.
Finished: The World of the Shining Prince. Ultimately worth reading, if you can get past the author's English biases and small amounts of repetition (we got it the first time when you called the Heian woman's world a twilight one, geez). Instead of a re-release with mentor stanning tacked on to the beginning, I would've preferred an updated version to remove the stupid comments and obviously wrong historical bits like the central/south Americans not knowing about the wheel.
I did get a laugh out of a page near the end, where he writes that Murasaki Shikibu would no sooner have written about a peasant than a Western author would write from the perspective of a horse or a pig. Gee, I wonder if there are any famous works of English-language literature that fit that description?
Currently Reading: Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan. It's a more academic book than the one above and also more repetitive - if I have to read about 'dutiful daughters' and the way parents, prostitutes, and officials used the concept of filial piety one more time I feel like I'm going to throw something. That said, it's an interesting look at prostitution in a very different cultural setting (Edo-period Japan) than I'm used to seeing it discussed; I knew a little bit, but this has a lot more detail and context. The author's main arguments so far are that in the Edo period, distinctions were newly drawn between 'prostitutes' and 'other women', or at least 'wives' and 'other women (whose bodies and labor can be sold to others)', and that moralizing attitudes towards the sex trade in the later part of the Edo period came about not because anyone cared that women were having sex, but because of a growing economic anxiety around women working outside the home and becoming economically independent even though most female sex workers were not independent or freelancing at all. So far, the chapter on Nagasaki was the most interesting, because there women remained much more embedded in their communities (and might also be allowed to see foreigners) than in the famous Yoshiwara of Edo.
Reading Next: IDK, but probably fiction.
