Autobiographers and memoirists as diverse in style and taste as Hirotsu Kazuo, Uno Chiyo, and Nakamura Shin'ichiro all in effect proclaim the improbability-or, more frankly in the case of Uno, the futility-of arriving at absolute autobiographical truth. Straints of biographical fact on the other.' The results are often a meditative adventure between and across interacting layers of biographical experiences before the authors acquire a new awareness of self and identity, turning themselves into artisans and choreographers as they reimagine the journeys of their souls-even if the actual journeys are only partially completed.

See Fukunaga's 'Kyoretsu na ichi kosei no jiden: Kato Shuichi cho Hitsuji no uta,' Nihon Keizai Shimbun, September 2, 1968. It is 'preposterous' ( tondemonai machigai ), said the novelist Fukunaga Takehiko, for his longtime friend Kato to assign such improbable thoughts to himself, a 'custom-made intellectual' ( tokubetsusei no interi ). See Kato's epilogue to A Sheep's Song, 409вЂ“10. Twentieth-century Japanese autobiographers, like their international cousins-Jawaharlal Nehru, Pu-yi, Mary McCarthy, and Jean-Paul Sartre-engage in the act of self-portraiture by answering to both artistic and historical imperatives, to what Paul John Eakin has described as 'the freedoms of imaginative creation on the one hand and the con. Far from being a frivolous game of hide and seek, autobiographical self-representation, when seriously pursued, is nothing less than a spiritual movement toward self-discovery. In the interest of self-knowledge, it is not only expedient but even inevitable that memory, imagination, and past and present consciousness should agree to suspend contesting visions of experience in favor of creative collaboration after a greater truth.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACEДЄfter presenting an autobiographical account of the first forty years of his extraordinary intellectual journey, Kato Shuichi surprised and bewildered many of his readers when, without any prior warning, he compared his personal experiences to 'those of an average contemporary Japanese.' Whether Kato's proclamation represents willful posturing, self-mockery, or genuine self-perception, the epistemological dynamics between Kato the autobiographer and Kato the autobiographical subject tellingly reveal the nature of rhetorical engagement in the autobiographical enterprise. A Sheep's Song: A Writer's Reminiscences of Japan and the World.В Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, c1999 1999.

Project aho a nostalgic aroma