July 11, 2005

New Translation of a Classic Japanese Tale

Manoa Associate Professor Joel Cohn recently published his translation of Botchan. Like The Catcher in the Rye or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Botchan, a hilarious tale about a young man's rebellion against “the system” in a country school, is a classic of its kind. Among Japanese readers both young and old it has enjoyed a timeless popularity, making it, according to Donald Keene, “probably the most widely read novel in modern Japan.”

The setting is Japan's deep south, where the author himself spent some time teaching English in a boys' school. Into this conservative world, with its social proprieties and established pecking order, breezes Botchan, down from the big city, with scant respect for either his elders or his noisy young charges; and the result is a chain of collisions large and small.

Much of the story seems to occur in summer, against the drone of cicadas, and in many ways this is a summer book—light, funny, never slow-moving. Here, in Cohn’s lively new translation much better suited to Western tastes than any of its forebears, Botchan's homespun appeal is all the more apparent, and even those who have never been near the sunlit island on which these calamitous episodes take place should find in it uninterrupted entertainment.

Botchan is available from the publisher’s website.

—Text excerpted from the publisher's website.

UH In Print

UH faculty and staff who had articles or other works published.

• Manoa Graduate Assistants Luke Dundon and Nicholas Moskovitz co-authored “Beyond the Principle of Plentitude: A Review of Terrestrial Planet Habitability” in Astrobiology.

• Manoa Assistant Professor Kimi Kondo-Brown published “How Different are the Language Skills of Subgroups of Heritage Language Learners from Traditional Foreign Language Learners?” in The Modern Language Journal.

E-mail news about UH faculty and staff who have appeared In Print to newsatuh@hawaii.edu.

Submit news about books or articles by UH faculty and staff

E-mail: newsatuh@hawaii.edu
Fax: 808 956-3441
Mail: External Affairs and University Relations
1627 Bachman Place
Bachman Annex 2
Honolulu, HI 96822


Other Links

UH Bookstore

UH Press

UH Libraries

College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources