How Asian Literature Makes You Richer, Smarter, and Better-Looking
I stopped by Barnes and Noble during my lunch break and tried to order two classics of the samurai way: the Hagakure and The Book of Five Rings.
“Did you look on the shelf?” the staffer asked. When I said I’d checked World History – where I did find Bushido: The Soul of Japan – she shook her head.
“I have them coming up under Sports and Management.”
I could handle the Hagakure being shelved with qigong and Bruce Lee. But to find a 17th-century Japanese treatise between How to Build a Board and The Disgruntled Employee?
Some savvy marketer must have decided to plug the Rings as “ancient” wisdom for the self-help crowd, who as we all know buy more books than anyone.
So what am I doing blogging when I could be making a buck with Genji’s Guide to Getting it On, Kannagi’s Fire-starting for the Pyromaniacally Challenged or Monkey’s How to Live Forever Without Really Trying (or, How to Conjure Up Ten Thousand Fully-Armed Mini-Me’s with Spit and Three Hairs)?
Granted, these are fictional characters, while the Rings is “a classic on leadership and strategy,” according to the jacket copy. But that I found the samurai guides in an ordinary megabookstore speaks to the existence (or perceived existence) of a general reader of older texts — when they’re marketed as books on martial arts, management, or world history.
If these books weren’t culturally and personally relevant, they would attract few readers. It’s just that the language of relevance is often so forced and, well, toothless. This from Alexander Woodside’s preface to The Tale of Kieu: “Western readers who are curious about Vietnam and the Vietnamese may well gain more real wisdom from cultivating a discriminating appreciation of this poem than they will from reading the entire library of scholarly and journalistic writings upon modern Vietnam which has accumulated in the West in the past two decades.” An entire library of scholarly and journalistic writings? No kidding.
Maybe I should announce that I’m reading the Shahnameh, an epic of pre-Islamic Persia from creation through the Arab invasion, since the conflicts in the Middle East are relevant today. I could also observe that the Romance of the Western Bower focuses on education and a successful career as means of winning your true love. Yes, China’s economic growth is due at least in part to the cultural emphasis on education. But that’s much too general, and smacks too much of the outsider passing uninformed judgment, to be of much use.
As for applying the “wisdom” of classics to everyday life, check out this tongue-in-cheek essay in last Sunday’s Times. Claiming he was “derailed” by the likes of Kafka and Saul Bellow, Lee Siegel traces his encounters with puzzled employers and dates. “‘What’s wrong?’ one girl asked me as we stared into each other’s eyes and I smiled ruefully. ‘Oh nothing,’ I said. ‘Spinoza associated desire with disconnected thinking — that’s all.’”
His conclusion: “The idea that great literature can improve our lives in any way is a con as old as culture itself.”
To be fair, I haven’t read the Rings yet. The Library Journal blurb on the cover claims it is “embraced by many contemporary readers as a manual on how to succeed in life.” Marketing hyperbole aside, maybe I AM missing something.
Guess I’ll read and see. If this blog goes dark and I win the coming election, you’ll know it worked.
