English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

“Flamboyant”, “incomparable”, “idiosyncratic”, “expressive”, “astonishing”, “sophisticated”, “striking”, “innovative”, “subtle”, “terrific”, “exciting”, “resourceful”, “clear” – this is the list of exuberant adjectives used by Lévi-Strauss on the condensed space of only six pages to familiarize the reader with his unrestrained appreciation of prehistoric Japanese Jōmon pottery and medieval court literature culture (pp. 30–36). In parts, this collection of short essays on Japan, published from 1979 to 2009, in fact reads like the notes of an extended hallucinogenic or epiphanous trip. Eventually, these rich and colorful descriptions and meditations by a completely overwhelmed Claude Lévi-Strauss have now been skillfully translated by Eva Moldenhauer into German as well (an English translation was published with Harvard UP in 2013, from which I allow myself to quote in this review). The essays collected in this volume are the result of five trips to Japan, which Lévi-Strauss undertook together with his wife, writer Monique Lévi-Strauss, between 1977 and 1988. Therefore, at first sight one might consider these writings as a reverberation of a heightened (sometimes exoticizing) interest of French intellectuals in Japan in the latter half of the 1960s, beginning with Sartre’s trip to Japan and culminating in Barthes visits in the following years. However, it is worth nothing that Lévi-Strauss’ first contact with Japan in fact took place much earlier and extends far back into his childhood, being in itself a reverberation of a much earlier aesthetic appreciation of Japan–Japonisme. As early as at the age of five, he received a woodblock print by Hiroshige as a present from his father, who was an impressionist painter, himself being deeply impressed with Japanese art. Thus, although one might criticize Lévi-Strauss for not always meeting his own high standards in his observations of Japan, namely that he considers it necessary “to escape the magnetic attraction” of the Japanese culture in order to “make a valid judgment” about its “place in the world” (or of any other culture) (p. 15), he nevertheless addresses some very important questions, reaching far beyond a trivial travel itinerary or simple descriptions of Japanese culture. In this review, I would like to focus on the two most important of these issues, namely (a) the question of Japan’s place in the world, specifically the place of Japanese mythology in a global context, and (b) the methodologically interesting question regarding the possibility of comparing cultures in general, especially when one is dealing with very remote cultures and civilizations. Lévi-Strauss begins his elaborations on Japanese mythology, once again, by positioning Japan in a somewhat unique position: “The fundamental problem of Japanese culture”, he writes, lies in the fact that this country, “placed at the far end of a vast continent, occupying a marginal position there, and having experienced long periods of isolation”, at the same time offers “in its most ancient texts a perfectly elaborated synthesis of elements found elsewhere in dispersed order” (p. 23). In particular, he compares and mutually contextualizes certain motifs and themes in the two “most ancient” Japanese texts, Kōjiki and Nihon shoki (both dating from the 8th century), with Native American and Indonesian mythology. When doing so, he is particularly interested in the motif of mediation or the mediating tertium between life and death, or the mortal and the immortal world, namely a very peculiar and central element of almost any mythology. In Japanese mythology as well, he argues, one can find various instances of ontologically ambivalent mediation between the two separated realms of the living and spirits/gods. Typically, these are moments of transition or transgression be-

Book review: &lt;i&gt;Die andere Seite des Mondes.&lt;/i&gt; &lt;i&gt;Schriften über Japan&lt;/i&gt;

Book review: <i>Die andere Seite des Mondes.</i> <i>Schriften über Japan</i>