On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë

While teaching in Japan, Judith Pascoe was fascinated to discover the popularity that Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights has enjoyed there. Nearly 100 years after its first formal introduction to the country, the novel continues to engage the imaginations of Japanese novelists, filmmakers, manga artists, and others, resulting in numerous translations, adaptations, and dramatizations. On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë is Pascoe's lively account of her quest to discover the reasons for the continuous Japanese embrace of Wuthering Heights, including quite varied and surprising adaptations of the novel. At the same time, the book chronicles Pascoe's experience as an adult student of Japanese. She contemplates the multiple Japanese translations of Brontë, as contrasted to the single (or nonexistent) English translations of major Japanese writers. Carrying out a close reading of a distant country's Wuthering Heights, Pascoe begins to see American literary culture as a small island on which readers are isolated from foreign literature.

"A highly readable and enjoyable little book." --Japan Times "Who knew about the Japanese obsession with the most obsessive of all English novels? Look closely and you can find Wuthering Heights almost anywhere: anime, drag shows (Heathcliff with spit curls), serious fiction, manga that run for years and years . . . Who knew? Well, Judith Pascoe did--and thanks to this book of marvels now we do as well." --Michael Gorra, Smith College "This book is a joy to read. None, I believe, neither scholar nor common reader, can fail to respond to the originality of its subject, the lucidity of its prose, the intellectual richness of its concerns. I celebrate its publication." --Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City "A beautifully written, innovative book that brings together personal memoir and an ethnographic scholarly study of translation and transnational flows of culture focused around the reception of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. The author's experience of Japan and the complex intersections of Wuthering Heights with Japanese culture are artfully layered and integrated." --Adela Pinch, University of Michigan, "Raise[s] important questions about how texts are transferred between cultures, and about why certain texts speak strongly to specific individuals and cultures." --Publishers Weekly, "Engrossing and far-reaching, this book is a unique and valuable contribution to literature on Japan, made all the better for its author's willingness to wander off her chosen path." --TLS

Judith Pascoe is George Mills Harper Professor of English, Florida State University.