[DeepL Translation - needs review] Writing" can only come from "reading. Here is a world that cannot be contained in a novel. This long-awaited collection of essays and criticism that unravels Mizumura's works is now available in paperback. A girl who loved novels so much that she emigrated to the U.S. in her teens to pursue graduate studies in a foreign country, where she devoted herself to the study of literature. This life naturally gave her the experience of seeing the "Japanese language...
This is the second volume in the collection of Mizumura’s non fiction writing, following on from 日本語で読むということ. This volume has the more meaty stuff (both more serious in content and generally longer), what the author calls より硬派なエッセイ. The book is divided into three parts, which get steadily more difficult.
Part one has essays generally on literary or literary adjacent topics which Mizumura characterises in her afterword as 楽しんで書いたものだし、読みやすいと思う – I liked the one about her first trip to Korea with its reflections on getting old (though she is IMHO absolutely tilting at windmills in her concluding ideas…).
Part two is more focused literary criticism/analysis of the “argument backed up by extensive quotes from the source work” variety. Four of the seven essays are about 漱石. These are definitely a harder read than part one (especially when the source work is a tricky one), but I enjoyed them. If you have read the source works (which sadly I have not) that probably helps. Note that the essays unsurprisingly include spoilers for the works they are discussing. I liked the one about 虞美人草, a work Soseki apparently considered a failure and his 尤も興味なきもの; he wrote a letter partway through its serialisation where he pretty much says he’s so fed up with it he wants to kill off the heroine and get it over with already… The essay about Tanizaki's 春琴抄 also makes an interesting argument that its feeling of reality is based in Tanizaki's ability to mix the newly emerged 言文一致 style with the older written style it was forcing out.
Part three is where the difficulty curve turns into a sheer cliff. This part is essays on the work of Paul de Man, a literary critic and literary theorist in the school of deconstruction. (If you’ve read "私小説―from left to right" you’ll recognize that de Man is the professor whose illness is one of the things the author used as an excuse for procrastinating taking her postgraduate oral examination.) Almost all this part is taken up by a Japanese version of the essay "Renunciation" which the author originally wrote in English and presented at that oral examination and then wrote up for the journal Yale French Studies. It is therefore uncompromisingly academic, and its subject is the writings of a man who was himself writing about other works in a very abstract and jargon heavy way, and the audience fellow academics who were deeply familiar with de Man’s work. Mizumura says about it in the afterword: これを日本語で読んで感心してくれた人物に逢ったことがあるが、私は私で彼の読解力、いや、想像力に感心した and goes on to suggest that reading the Japanese version in parallel with the English original may be the best way forward! I suspect most readers take her other suggested option: ああ、こんなことをやっていたのだなとパラパラめくる… (I read the whole thing in the sense of reading the sentences, but I definitely did not understand it beyond very fragmentarily.)