The Silver Spoon: Memoir of a Boyhood in Japan

by Kansuke Naka, Hiroaki Sato (Translator)

Overview

Perhaps the most admired childhood memoir ever written in Japan, The Silver Spoon is a sharp detailing of life at the end of the Meiji period (1912) through the eyes of a boy as he grows into adolescence. Innocence fades as he slowly becomes aware of himself and others, while scene after scene richly evokes the tastes, lifestyles, landscapes, objects, and manners of a lost Japan.

Kansuke Naka (1885–1965) was a Japanese poet, essayist, and novelist. He was a student of the great novelist Soseki Natsume, who lavishly praised the “freshness and dignity” of Naka’s prose and encouraged the first publication of The Silver Spoon.

Hiroaki Sato is a writer, reviewer, and translator with over forty works of classical and modern Japanese poetry, prose, and fiction published in English. He has received the PEN American Center Translation Prize and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He lives in New York City and writes a monthly column on politics and society for the Japan Times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611720198
Publisher:	Stone Bridge Press
Publication date:	10/27/2015
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	1210L (what's this?)

About the Author

Kansuke Naka (1885–1965) was a Japanese poet, essayist, and novelist. He was a student of the great novelist Soseki Natsume, who lavishly praised the “freshness and dignity” of Naka’s prose and encouraged the first publication of The Silver Spoon.

Hiroaki Sato is a writer, reviewer, and translator with over forty works of classical and modern Japanese poetry, prose, and fiction published in English. He has received the PEN American Center Translation Prize and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He lives in New York City and writes a monthly column on politics and society for the Japan Times.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Notes

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2017 - 2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Translation Prize

Its enduring status as one of Japan’s most-loved accounts of life in Tokyo at the beginning of the 20th century is due not only to Naka’s historical details, but also because it is a parable for our contemporary sense of isolation.

— The Japan Times

5/5 Stars "Wonderful, easy to read and filled with fascinating information on Japanese life and culture."

— San Francisco Book Review

"An inherently fascinating and thoroughly absorbing read from beginning to end. Of immense interest for academia and the non-specialist general reader with an interest in Japanese history and culture.”

— Midwest Book Review(January 2016 Reviewer’s Bookwatch)

Hiroaki Sato has done his readers a great service though his elegant translation of one of the great classics of modern Japanese literature, THE SILVER SPOON of Naka Kansuke. Complete with copious and useful notes on Naka’s contemporary culture, and with skillful illustrations by Yano Sumiko, the book is an absorbing glimpse into a now-vanished world and how it shaped the life of an individual writer of enormous talent.

— J. Thomas Rimer, Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature, Theatre, and Art at the University of Pittsburgh

In Sato's nuanced and subtle rendering, we, as readers, re-experience the strange fluidity of a child's tentative apprehension of the looming world around, that wondrous and unsettling sense of discovery amid the flux."

— Meera Sushila Viswanathan, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University

From the Publisher