The East and The West Harmoniously Coexisting as Jacob's Descendants Under the Care of Mary of The East and The West: David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is generally read as a historical novel whose theme is the reconciliation of the East and the West as well as other dichotomies in today’s global society. The novel rather promotes the harmonious coexistence of the East and the West and the unity of science and the humanities beyond the gaps caused by their differences. The protagonists, Jacob (West) and Orito (East), love each other, not in the having mode but in the giving mode, and they deliver a new being without sleeping with each other, like Joseph and Mary, in a world full of the desire to have material goods and people as property. This is like Dejima and Enomoto’s shrine, which can be likened to the literary tradition of dystopian literature. Orito’s face resembles the bombed Virgin Mary in Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki and in Guernica Cathedral. An excellent midwife and medical scientist, Orito loves human beings and saves their lives in the role of the bombed Virgin Mary

Counterturn-of-Faith and Manifest in Translation: Haruki Murakami’s Translation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer, is also a well-known translator in Japan. He has rendered several modern American novels into Japanese. His translations are very readable. However, they betray the reader in a sense because he tends to domesticate facts. Hence, the more faithfully he translates an original text, the more it contains local Japanese contexts. The translated novel is more inclined to represent Japanese society than American culture. This tendency becomes clear when Murakami’s rendition of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is compared to Naotar? Takiguchi’s version from the perspectives of translation style and methods. An examination of Murakami’s translation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s yields the discovery that rather than the 1940s NewYork setting of the original text, Murakami’s Tiffany’s represents Japanese society, particularly the lifestyle of post-bubble economy Tokyo

How Should We Read Literature from a Certain Area from the Viewpoints of Other Language-Speaking Areas?

The concept of “world literature” can be viewed as insisting on returning to reading a text without the mechanical use of literary theory. This means, as Zhang Longxi notes, referring to Kermode, “tak[ing] whatever theoretical help you fancy, but follow[ing] your nose” (Zhang 2010, 7; Kermode 2004, 85) 2 and reading literature through multidimensional interpretations. If I can regard the reading of a text put in the framework of literary theory as a kind of paternalistic and dogmatic “check-up,” then I will label the alternative, reading literature in a kind of follow-your-nose way, Rogerian empathy—the understanding of the “voice” of a text from its internal framework of references. However, this raises a simple question: How should we read literature from a certain area from the viewpoints of other language-speaking areas? “The deconstruction,” Paul de Man says, “constituted the text in the first place” (1979, 17), but if so, meanings of sentences are defined on the basis of a reader’s socio-cultural background—such as traditions, ways of thinking, and laws—and emotion. A person’s reading of literature in another language might always result in misreading in a sense. However, we cannot simply call it misreading, because “I feel, therefore I am.” From a neurological perspective, intelligence and emotion are united. Intelligence and feeling link to the faculty of reason, and emotion has a critical role in enhancing one’s faculties. As brain scientist Antonio R. Damasio mentions, “Emotion, feeling and biological regulation all play a role in human reasoning” (2005, 8). In our global society, we should empathize with and understand voices, or interpretations, in the world, and discuss them together on a world scale in order to cross-culturally understand each other and promote peace

How to Employ Nagasaki: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (1982)

Not a few scholars believe that representation of scenery in Nagasaki is a mockery in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel A Pale View of Hills (1982). However, Etsuko’s narration faithfully represents individual facts about Nagasaki, but her combinations of facts are not consistent with the real world. Overall, Ishiguro’s narrative strategy is to represent as realistically as possible how a person’s memory works; at a time when rigid opposition between history and fiction collapsed as a result of the expanding literary theory of postmodernist positivism. A somewhat distorted narrative of recollections holds true not only in Etsuko but in human beings generally. If everything in the record of one’s past life is fictional, realizing how one’s memory is distorted or colored is impossible. Thus, Ishiguro wrote Etsuko’s reminiscences by faithfully describing facts of Nagasaki, for instance, nonlinguistic artifacts and relics, but making them anachronistic or discordant in time and space. This strategy resists the postmodern view of history and simultaneously emphasizes human memories’ ambiguities and distortions. Nagasaki, as a faithful background setting for Etsuko’s memories, is entirely plausible because Ishiguro was born and raised there until he was six years old. Yet, the realism of A Pale View of Hills encompasses a universal story of reminiscence or human testimony by employing the narratives of an atomic-bomb victim and a war bride

Mapping the Subterranean of Haruki Murakami’s Literary World

"A good map is worth a thousand words, cartographers say, and they are right: because it produces a thousand words: it raises doubts, ideas. It poses new questions, and forces you to look for new answers", said Franco Moretti (Moretti 1999, pp. 3–4). The purpose of this article is to bring to light relations that would otherwise remain hidden in this current time of globalization and to analyze the literary works of Haruki Murakami in a literary topography: in other words, through literary maps above and under the ground, of today and of the past, and on this world and on the other world. Making literary maps of Murakami's novels, especially of the routes of the characters walks in Tokyo, has been popular (e.g. Tokyo Kurenaidan 1999, Urazumi 2000). When we consider Murakami's obsession with the subterranean world, his fictional metaphors of features like a field well and the bottom of the sea, and the characters’ strange semiconscious walks, however, mapping just the surface of the ground is not enough. We should focus on Murakami’s subterrane as long as he is obsessed with the subterranean world. Therefore, I superimposed a map of ancient Tokyo on that of today. The result is that you find Murakami's characters, even when they walk in downtown Tokyo, tend to walk along the water's edge and through cemeteries and burial mounds: in short, they walk with or as spirits of the dead. These mappings show the past or the dead violently controls characters in the "here and now", and is a pattern from his early novels, which are set in Ashiya, Hyogo. Murakami tells that "Yamikuro" live under the world and controls violence above the ground. The anagram of "Yamikuro" is "I mark you". It means that people on the ground are controlled by the past or the dead under the ground, which is a typical expression for power of memory of Japanese

Bioluminescence Microscopy: Design and Applications

Bioluminescence imaging by microscopy is performed using an ultra-low-light imaging camera. Although imaging devices such as sensor and camera have been greatly improved over time, such improvements have not been attained commercially which are available for microscopes now. We previously optimized the optical system of a microscope for bioluminescence imaging using a short-focal-length imaging lens and evaluated this system with a conventional color charge-coupled device camera. Here, we describe the concept of bioluminescence microscope design using a short-focal-length imaging lens and some representative applications, including intracellular calcium imaging, imaging of clock gene promoter assays, and three-dimensional reconstruction of Drosophila larva. This system facilitates the acquisition of bioluminescence images of single live cells using luciferase, which is similar to fluorescence microscopy using a fluorescent protein

Gastric Composite Tumor of Alpha Fetoprotein-Producing Carcinoma/Hepatoid Adenocarcinoma and Endocrine Carcinoma with Reference to Cellular Phenotypes

Alpha-fetoprotein-producing carcinoma (AFPC)/hepatoid adenocarcinoma (HAC) and neuroendocrine carcinoma (NEC) are uncommon in the stomach. Composite tumors consisting of these carcinomas and their histologic phenotypes are not well known. Between 2002 and 2007, to estimate the prevalence of composite tumors consisting of tubular adenocarcinoma, AFPC/HAC and NEC, we reviewed specimens obtained from 294 consecutive patients treated surgically for gastric cancer. We examined histological phenotype of tumors of AFPC or NEC containing the composite tumor by evaluating immunohistochemical expressions of MUC2, MUC5AC, MUC6, CDX2, and SOX2. Immunohistochemically, AFPC/HAC dominantly showed the intestinal or mixed phenotype, and NEC frequently showed the gastric phenotype. In the composite tumor, the tubular and hepatoid components showed the gastric phenotype, and the neuroendocrine component showed the mixed type. The unique composite tumor predominantly showed the gastric phenotype, and the hepatoid and neuroendocrine components were considered to be differentiated from the tubular component

Pigment-dispersing activities and cortisol-releasing activities of melanocortins and their receptors in xanthophores and head kidneys of the goldfish Carassius auratus

The five subtypes of melanocortin receptors (MCRs) mediate the functions of α-melanocyte-stimulating hormone (α-MSH) and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). In fish, these hormones are involved in pigment dispersion and cortisol release, respectively. α-MSH-related peptides exhibit ACTH-like activity in certain fishes. We recently found that multiple Mcr transcripts are expressed in some cell types in the barfin flounder, which is related to regulation of α-MSH activities. Similar results were also observed for the cortisol-releasing activity of α-MSH-related peptides in the head kidney. The present study was undertaken to assess relationship between the expression of multiply expressed Mcrs and α-MSH activities using goldfish. We also determined if α-MSH-related peptides exhibit ACTH-like activity in goldfish. The transcripts of Mc1r, but not those of other subtypes, were observed in xanthophores. α-MSH, which has an acetyl group at the N-terminus, was found to disperse pigment in a dose-dependent manner in xanthophores. This potency was found to be slightly greater than that of desacetyl-α-MSH. These results support our findings that MCR has a higher affinity for α-MSH when single Mcr subtype is expressed. On the other hand, transcripts of Mc2r, but not those of other subtypes, were observed in the head kidney. ACTH1-24-stimulated cortisol release was observed in a dose-dependent manner, while α-MSH-related peptides showed no activity. It therefore appears that MC2R also acts as an ACTH-specific receptor in goldfish and that association of α-MSH-related peptides upon release of cortisol is uncommon in fishes. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.Peer Reviewe

テクストの「はぐらかし」に抵抗するとき : ゴードン・リッシュ著「はぐらかし」の反理論性を読む

A postmodernist Gordon Lish published a short-short novel "The Merry Chase" in 1985. The text is characterized by complaints from the narrator "I," who complains to "you" from beginning to end. For a reader to understand the complaints, he or she must first understand what the antecedents of the pronouns are, and then determine the meaning of the complaints. However, the reader will not find the referents of the pronouns in the text. Still, Jack Derrida\u27s language-related thoery helps the reader to understand the complaints. The theory can explain that it is a complaint of the text whose meaning is determined and thus, as scholars point out, "The Merry Chase" is a work of metafiction which shows that there is no meaning in a text. However, when a reader does read in fact "The Merry Chase" with Derrida\u27s theory in mind, he or she faces sentences which states that the text itself wants the reader to find "the unvarnished truth" ("The Merry Chase," 50) in the text. The best explanation for this fact can be found in Walter Benn Michaels\u27 discussion of the interpretation of literary texts. According to his explanation, when a reader reads a text, he or she regards each of the words not as just a shape but as something that has a meaning. It leads the reader to imagine the subject behind the signifiers - the one who wrote them - and to try to accept the message from that subject. It is natural as a reader\u27s response to a text even if he or she admits that Derrida\u27s theory related to language is true. Thus, a reader can explain the meaning of a literary text through Derrida\u27s theory, although such an explanation is contradictory to his theory. This view leads us to the interpretation that "The Merry Chase" is metafiction which embodies not Derrida\u27s theory but a reader\u27s natural response to a literary text-reading a text and trying to determine its meaning - and the natural demands that the text makes of the reader