Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
I found the first two parts of this book compellingly brilliant -- and had decided that the book was an allegory. The narrator of Parts I-II, who speaks in the first person, is not the author (note the ages/dates), but an exemplum of Japanese Modernity -- where Sensei is an exemplum of the Meiji period. But by the end of Part III, this interpretation was untenable, and the sheer neurosis of the story had begun to weigh on me. Hence the 4-stars (instead of 5).The Emperor Meiji died in 1912; this book was written in 1914; Natsume Soseki died (at the age of 48) in 1916. I have this book, very highly recommended to me, on file -- dealing with Japan and WWI:
http://www.amazon.com/War-National-Reinvention-1914-1919-Monographs/dp/0674005074/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S?ie=UTF8&coliid=I1ZQRVL7YX8TIY&colid=24OOHW1SQ5E41
The final page of the book mentions Watanabe Kazan:
Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watanabe_Kazan