Quotes from Shimazaki Tōson's books, and about them
A New Life on The Analects: “Before he studied school books, he had learned a three-character primer his father wrote out himself, and once he went to the village school his father taught him to recite the Great Learning and the Analects aloud. [auto-translated]”
A New Life on The Great Learning: “Before he studied school books, he had learned a three-character primer his father wrote out himself, and once he went to the village school his father taught him to recite the Great Learning and the Analects aloud. [auto-translated]”
A New Life on Anna Karenina: “From the war before his eyes, Kishimoto began to read the hearts of the people moving within it. Like Vronsky's departure at the end of Anna Karenina, he could easily imagine young Frenchmen going willingly to the front to save themselves. [auto-translated]”
A New Life on Don Quixote: “The tercentenary of Cervantes was being marked, and in the bookshop windows new works commemorated the famous Spanish author who wrote Don Quixote. For a man devoted to letters like Kishimoto, walking past those windows made him feel all the more a traveler. [auto-translated]”
A New Life on Confessions: “We are happy, aren't we? In Rousseau's Confessions, which you gave me, there is a passage saying that true happiness cannot be told, only felt, and that the less it can be put into words the more deeply it is felt. How true that is. [auto-translated]”
A New Life on The Murasaki Shikibu Diary: “The mademoiselle, a pure Frenchwoman who had gone to Japan out of love for it and now lived in Tokyo, could already speak a good deal of Japanese and read something like Murasaki Shikibu's diary. [auto-translated]”
A Fool's Life on A New Life: “Even Rousseau's Confessions was full of heroic lies, and as for Shinsei, he had never met a more cunning hypocrite than its hero. [auto-translated]”
Words of a Pygmy on A New Life: “After reading Shinsei: did a "new life" ever really come? [auto-translated]”
A Country Teacher on Ochiumeshu: “On the desk in the main hall lay Midaregami, Ochiumeshu, Musashino, and the thin copy of Enoch Arden that the priest had read when he went to Waseda. [auto-translated]”
A Country Teacher on Wakanashu: “That night Seizo thought about many things until late. He took out his battered copy of Toson's Wakanashu, its binding coming apart, and read on and on. [auto-translated]”