The Bodhisattva, or Samantabhadra by Jun Ishikawa, William J. Tyler (translator)[Coderhash]

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Overview: Often compared to Nabokov and Borges, Ishikawa Jun (1899-1987) is one of Japan’s most distinguished modern novelists. Winner of the Akutagawa Prize—Japan’s most prestigious literary award—The Bodhisattva is Ishikawa Jun’s powerful satire of Japanese intellectuals in the 1930s, and is considered to be his seminal work. Its sardonic humor can be seen as an antidote to the ultranationalist thinking pervasive in Japan at the time.

The Bodhisattva is the story of an impoverished novelist living in downtown Tokyo who is driven by a dream of the millennium. This dream is manifested in his commitment to writing about Joan of Arc and her chronicler Christine de Pizan, and in his love for a young woman involved in the political underground. The novelist builds successive layers through a series of parallels between “dust and flowers”—Japan in the 1930s and France in the fifteenth century—and the dream of divine intervention through Joan of Arc’s Asian counterpart, the bodhisattva.

Ishikawa Jun’s beautiful layering of images from classical Western and Asian literature characterizes this remarkable work of modern Japanese resistance literature and metafiction.

Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics