Vintage (Random House), 264 pages, 1920
I read this as a pretentious 15-year-old and fully expected it to have failed the test of time eight years later. The only reason I wanted to read it again was because I was reading a biography of legendary Scribner editor Max Perkins before coming to Japan (which I never finished--might try to bring it back with me when I go on my trip home), and this was the novel that launched Perkins's (and Fitzgerald's) career. While rereading it I remembered how much it once meant to me, and discovered that even after college, the coming-of-age story of a self-absorbed, lazy, self-styled intellectual at Princeton wasn't half bad. I think I considered myself a female version of protagonist Amory Blaine when I first read it, and I want to be able to look back and say "Oh God, I was so full of it," but I kind of can't help but admire my teenage self for managing to be so damn earnest about this whole literature thing back when intellect was not considered a desirable trait by my peer group and Thursday Night Market was the closest thing to culture there was in town.
Vintage International (Random House), 183 pages, 1954, translated by Meredith Weatherby in 1956
After The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, reading a Mishima novel where both the hero and heroine are good, simple people and virtue triumphs over evil in the end was... strange, to say the least. I really enjoyed it, though! The writing is beautiful and it's full of all the now-familiar little details about Japanese village life (visiting the local shrine, meeting neighbors at the public bath, junior high school kids going on the yearly trip to Kyoto).
Next up: East of Eden by John Steinbeck
