Siegfried Schaarschmidt Books

Isao is a young, engaging patriot, and a fanatical believer in the ancient samurai ethos. He turns terrorist, organising a violent plot against the new industrialists, who he believes are threatening the integrity of Japan and usurping the Emperor’s rightful power. As the conspiracy unfolds and unravels, Mishima brilliantly chronicles the conflicts of a decade that saw the fabric of Japanese life torn apart.

Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial familes, a new and powerful political and social elite. Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family - members of the waning aristocracy - but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and his feelings for the exquisite, spirited Satoko, observed from the sidelines by his devoted friend Honda. When Satoko is engaged to a royal prince, Kiyoaki realises the magnitude of his passion.

Yukio Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel is the final novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. It is the last installment of Shigekuni Honda’s pursuit of the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsugae. It is the late 1960s and Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, once more encounters a person he believes to be a reincarnation of his friend, Kiyoaki — this time restored to life as a teenage orphan, Tōru. Adopting the boy as his heir, Honda quickly finds that Tōru is a force to be reckoned with. The final novel of this celebrated tetralogy weaves together the dominant themes of the previous three novels in the series: the decay of Japan’s courtly tradition; the essence and value of Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics; and, underlying all, Mishima’s apocalyptic vision of the modern era.

Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of Dawn is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility . Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend. Travelling in Thailand in the early 1940s, Shigekuni Honda, now a brilliant lawyer, is granted an audience with a young Thai princess—an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. In spite of all reason, he is convinced she is the reincarnated spirit of his friend Kiyoaki. As Honda goes to great lengths to discover for certain if his theory is correct, The Temple of Dawn becomes the story of one man’s obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and his equally passionate search for enlightenment.

„Eine gut erzählte Geschichte verträgt zehn Münder, oder sie ist keine. Das Tuti Nameh hat wie alle Klassiker tausendundeinen Mund vertragen und strahlt heute in einer Frische, als hätten die genialen Erzähler vor tausend Jahren in Indien unsere Zeit gemeint“, schreibt Rafik Schami in seinem Vorwort zu den /k/Geschichten des Papageien/k/. Siegfried Schaarschmidt hat aus der Fülle der Geschichten, die der weise Papagei dem Sultan Kobad in Damaskus erzählt, die schönsten ausgewählt und sie in eine zeitgemäße Sprache übertragen. Auf diese Weise ist ein verschütteter Schatz orientalischer Märchenpoesie endlich zugänglich geworden.

Die japanische Literatur, eine der vielfältigsten und interessantesten Literaturen der Gegenwart, ist hierzulande immer noch »terra incognita«. Für entdeckungsfreudige Leser bietet der vorliegende Band in einführenden Einzeldarstellungen mit Autorenporträts und einer Bibliographie der nach 1945 übersetzten japanischen Literatur umfassende und übersichtliche Information.