'In the Woods of Memory': Okinawan novelist makes history visceral

From an article in The Japan Times:

It is almost impossible to find a serious novel that does not touch on the subject of death. “In the Woods of Memory,” taking for its theme the death of the soul, is no exception.

The rape of a 17-year-old girl by four U.S. soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa forms the animating horror at the core of this story, based on a number of similar cases related to the author [Shun Medoruma] by his relatives.

In writing this novel, Medoruma creates a sound chamber of voices, time shifts and associations, moving back and forth from 1945 to 2005. He filters experiences through eye witnesses, a wartime Okinawan-American interpreter, an obsequious village ward chief, an American attacker now tormented in his old age by his collusion in an act of barbarity, and his grandson, who is given the harpoon head used by Seiji in the attack on his grandfather.

read more here @ The Japan Times

read reviews here @ Foreword Reviews, @ Asia-Pacific Journal, @ Stone Bridge Press

Imaging Reveals Medieval Manuscript Hidden in Book Binding

From Live Science:

In the mid-16th century, a bookbinder picked up a piece of parchment — one that was already centuries old — and used it to bind a book of poetry. This parchment's text remained unreadable for nearly 500 years, but now, thanks to state-of-the-art imaging techniques, people can read its words once more, according to a new study.

An analysis of the sixth-century text revealed that it was part of the Roman law code. Whoever made the poetry book likely considered the text to be outdated, as at that point, society was using the church's code, rather than Roman laws, the researchers said.

read more here @ Live Science

A Brilliant Defense of Christendom

From Crisis Magazine comes this review of Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX by Andrew Willard Jones:

In medieval times, we are told that tyranny ruled, and the Church and the nascent State were constant rivals in the pursuit of dominance. So many modern historians have cynically reduced this period when Christianity prevailed to a time of cultural darkness and violent power struggles.

Our historian’s central thesis is simply stated: “I argue that thirteenth century France was not a world of the secular and religious vying for position and power, but a world in which the material and the spiritual were totally dependent on each other and penetrated one another at every level.”

He claims medieval society offered “a coherent vision of the whole in which mankind moved through grace from the lesser to the greater, from the fallen to the redeemed. It was an integral vision which included all of social reality and it was removed from our own.”

read more here 

@ Crisis Magazine

@ St Paul Center

@ Amazon

'Flowering of the Bamboo': Revisiting the mass poisoning of 1948

From The Japan Times:

The acronym GUBU (grotesque, unusual, bizarre and unprecedented) fits the mass murder at the Teihoku Bank in Tokyo on Jan. 26, 1948. Sixteen people were deliberately poisoned, including an 8-year-old boy. More money was left behind than stolen.

While the incident has long been pored over in Japan, Triplett’s book was one of the first to explore the explosive case in English when it was published in 1985. Triplett, a journalist and playwright, stumbled on the case upon hearing about Sadamichi Hirasawa, a painter who was convicted of the murders and sentenced, but never executed. He lived out his life on death row. Hirasawa’s conviction was widely disputed.

Triplett examines the case from two perspectives: Hirasawa’s and that of Unit 731, the Imperial Army’s secretive Biological Warfare outfit, which had been operational during World War II and had ties to the case.

Besides the forensics of the crime Triplett’s book portrays just how much Japan was in flux in the immediate aftermath of the war: The Americans were trying to pull Japan’s institutions out of a deeply ingrained feudalistic culture, the police wanted to get someone on the hook quickly, and the press didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory while trying to convict Hirasawa in the court of public opinion. A compelling read, even if it unearths more questions than it answers.

read more here 

@ The Japan Times

@ Huffington Post

@ wikipedia - Sadamichi Hirasawa

See also:

• Unit 731: Testimony by Hal Gold
• Occupied City by David Peace
• Justice in Japan: The Notorious Teijin Scandal by Richard H Mitchell
• The Super Sleuths by Bruce Henderson & Sam Summerlin

Draft Copy - The King James Bible

A fragment of the earliest known draft of the King James Bible has been discovered in Cambridge. 

However, new controversies seem to arise from this discovery. After examination and investigation of the manuscript, it was reported that the King James Bible had discarded big chunks of the original text of the Bible. Several notable people and events were completely erased from this new version. According to Dr Miller, this might have happened either because of some politics of the age or simply because of the laziness of the translators.

This discovery helps us to see the degree to which human intervention at a particular period of time has affected the Bible. Though the King James Bible is considered, as mentioned above, the “Word of God”, the unearthing of this manuscript may indicate towards the fact that this version of the Bible was actually a product of ideas and notions of the translators.

read more here @ The New York News Day

Review: Ten Dead Comedians

The title caught my attention.  Then I read the premise:

A darkly clever take on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and other classics of the genre,Ten Dead Comedians is a marvel of literary ventriloquism, with hilarious comic monologues in the voice of every suspect. It’s also an ingeniously plotted puzzler with a twist you’ll never see coming!

So I knew what I was in for - a comedic take on a classic elimination murder mystery. And I wasn't disappointed.  The story was simple - a series of text messages are sent out to various comedians, inviting them to a small Jamaican island to take part in the next big thing.  No-one is about to greet them, and in each of their rooms is a memento of the past or the future.  A video by their host, the great Dustin Walker, accuses them all of crimes against comedy - all are to be judged and no-one is leaving - alive.

" ... a room full of comics turns into a shark tank with one sniff of blood in the water ..."

The story then builds up with each chapter.  There are plot twists upon plot twists, the characters are suitable odorous, and you found that you didn't really know which character you should be rooting for to survive the obligatory gruesome end.

I knew what I was in for and found myself engaged, having some preconception of the proposed plot-line as I am a dedicated Agatha Christie fan.  Fred van Lente's homage to this classic crime genre, style of story-telling, and sardonic humour will not be to everyone's taste ... but it is what is is.

Reviews:

@ Kirkus Reviews

@ Criminal Element

For movie-buffs, see also:

And Then There Were None (1945 film)

And Then There Were None (1974 film)

Ten Little Indians (1965 film)

Ten Little Indians (1987 film)

Ten Little Indians (1985 film)

Clue (1985 film)

And Then There Were None ( 2015 miniseries)

The Library of William O'Brien

William O'Brien (1832-1899)

About four months ago The Guardian newspaper online ran an article about the forthcoming sale of the personal library of William O'Brien, an Irish judge and bibliophile. A large collection of books held in the Jesuit Library near Dublin for over a century, including many items of incunabula (books published prior to 1501), will go up for sale. The value of those being put up for sale is estimated at £1,500,000 (or about $1.9 million).

According to the Irish Times, Sotheby's described the collection as "one of the most important of its kind to come to the market." It is said to contain rare printed books from the 15th century, early Shakespeare editions, literature, and medieval manuscripts. A catalogue puiblished in 1932 by the Milltown Park Library (Jesuits) listed 117 items bequeathed to it by William O'Brien in 1899. An indication of the size of the collection is that the University of Cambridge had one of the largest libraries at the beginning of the 14th century, which consisted of 122 books.

read more here:
@ The Guardian

@ Jesuits In Ireland

@ Sotherby's Blog - Introduction: William O'Brien

@ Sotherby's- auction results

The Treasures of Timbuktu

From an article in The New York Times, comes a tale straight from the pages of an Indianna Jones script - a fascinating tale of a group of librarians who saved the ancient manuscripts of Timbuktu from jihadists. Or did they????

On Jan. 28, 2013, news broke of an epic cultural catastrophe. That morning, the mayor of Timbuktu, Halle Ousmane Cissé, told journalists that the jihadist occupiers of the town had destroyed its famous literary heritage. Experts declared it to be a disaster of incalculable proportions, the greatest loss of the written word in Africa since the destruction of the library of Alexandria.

Journalist and author, Charlie English was determined to find out more, and uncovered a story as fantastical as it was incredulous. He concludes that:

At its core, the story of the rescue of Timbuktu’s manuscripts is significantly true. But if it is more complex than it first appears, and vastly embellished, we should expect no less. The most fascinating part of the Timbuktu tale is that the doubts and distortions surrounding the 21st-century “Indiana Jones moment” mirror the myths that have arisen about the city throughout its history. Timbuktu has always traded on legend. The misreadings of this city have been the making of this place; they are what draws the world to it.

This event was further reported by various news organisation who beguiled readers with the epic adventures of the "bad-ass librarians" who with near military precision manged to remove over 370,000 manuscripts from a city in the grips of being overrun by military insurgents to safety - all without being caught.

read entire article here @ The New York Times
read more here @ NPR and  @ The Weekend Australian

A number of books have been written on the subject:

• The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer
• The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past by Charlie English
• The Book Smugglers Of Timbuktu: The Race To Reach The Fabled City And The Fantastic Effort To Save Its Past by Charlie English

read reviews here 

• William Dalrymple reviews The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu by Charlie English for The Guardian
• Tom Zoellner review The Storied City by Charlie English for the New York Times
• The Storied City @ Kirkus Review
• Bad-Ass Librarians @ Kirkus Review

     

The Battle of Clontarf - Ireland’s Troy?

New research suggests that the standard account of the Battle of Clontarf - Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh (“The War Of The Irish Against The Foreigners”) – was partly a literary history borrowed from a classic tale of the Trojan Wars.

In Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative edited by Ralph O'Connor, a chapter by Maire Ni Mhaonaigh - The metaphorical Hector': the literary portrayal of Murchad mac Bríain - relooks at the historical accounts of the Battle of Contarf, the legendary battle between the Irish and the Vikings in 1014.

Through a close study of the text, Dr Ní Mhaonaigh found that the imagery, terminology and ideas draw inspiration from a range of earlier sources – in particular Togail Troí (The Destruction of Troy), an eleventh-century translation of a fifth-century account of the battle for Troy.

In popular history, the battle has been characterised as an epic and violent clash between the army of the Christian Irish High King, Brian Boru, and a combined force led by the rebel king of the territory of Leinster, Máel Mórda, and Sitric, leader of the Dublin-based Vikings. The disputed outcome saw the Vikings beaten off, but at huge cost. Brian himself was killed, and became an iconic figure and Irish martyr.

“Academics have long accepted that Cogadh couldn’t be taken as reliable evidence but that hasn’t stopped some of them from continuing to draw on it to portray the encounter. What this research shows is that its account of the battle was crafted, at least in part, to create a version of events that was the equivalent of Troy. This was more than a literary flourish, it was a work of a superb, sophisticated and learned author.”

read more here @ University of Cambridge

Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative edited by Ralph O'Connor

From the tenth century onwards, Irish scholars adapted Latin epics and legendary histories into the Irish language, including the Imtheachta Aeniasa, the earliest known adaptation of Virgil's Aeneid into any European vernacular; Togail Troí, a grand epic reworking of the decidedly prosaic history of the fall of Troy attributed to Dares Phrygius; and, at the other extreme, the remarkable Merugud Uilixis meic Leirtis, a fable-like retelling of Ulysses's homecoming boiled down to a few hundred lines of lapidary prose.