 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Gossamer Years: Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan (Tuttle Classics) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Product Description
Synopsis
I SHALL not touch upon the frivolous love notes I had received from time to time. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
I loved this book. The way her fluctuating emotions are described as she feels elation at receiving a visit from him to utter despair as she waits days, often months for further acknowledgement from him really touched me. I could not help but feel sorry for her.
A great read.
This is an nice book and I found it very interesting to read. However, its long, a bit boring/repetitive after a while, and her tone is all too often whiny.
Definitly worth reading, but this translation by Seidensticker isnt as good as the now out of print edition by Sonja Arntzen. The reason for this is because she translates from a female perspective and so the tone is a lot softer.
This edition of the book is excellently produced. The notes (a considerable number of them) are at the end of the book, and shed a very informative light upon the body of the main text. It pays to read the book through twice; once without the notes, and once with.
All in all a rewarding, interesting and strangely timeless volume.
Teachers of Japanese literature might find it useful to pair readings from the idealized novel Tale of Genji with similiar episodes in the real life Gossamer Years -- all too often students are left dazzled by the brilliance of Murasaki's novel and tend to believe it represents an accurate view of court life in the Heian period. Murasaki's novel is high literature and possessed of significant psychological insight and truly deserves its status as a great work of world literature, but it is fiction. The Gossamer Years, written by a real woman about her real life, gives a very different view of how it felt to actually live with a philandering husband and court intrigues, as well as worrying about more ordinary tasks such as sewing and raising a son.
The reader who wants more exciting stories and courtly tales from the Heian period would probably be better entertained by works such as The Changelings (a tale of a brother and sister who swap places in life), The Tale of Ise (poetry and episodes from the life of a gentleman famous as a poet and a lover), and the The Tale of the Heike (the epic tale of the rise and fall of the House of Taira, a sequence of events which formally ended the Heian era and ushered in the rule of the samurai).
Teachers of Japanese literature might find it useful to pair readings from the idealized novel Tale of Genji with similiar episodes in the real life Gossamer Years -- all too often students are left dazzled by the brilliance of Murasaki's novel and tend to believe it represents an accurate view of court life in the Heian period. Murasaki's novel is high literature and possessed of significant psychological insight and truly deserves its status as a great work of world literature, but it is fiction. The Gossamer Years, written by a real woman about her real life, gives a very different view of how it felt to actually live with a philandering husband and court intrigues, as well as worrying about more ordinary tasks such as sewing and raising a son.
The reader who wants more exciting stories and courtly tales from the Heian period would probably be better entertained by works such as The Changelings (a tale of a brother and sister who swap places in life), The Tale of Ise (poetry and episodes from the life of a gentleman famous as a poet and a lover), and the The Tale of the Heike (the epic tale of the rise and fall of the House of Taira, a sequence of events which formally ended the Heian era and ushered in the rule of the samurai).
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
