in which things take a turn for the worse

(WARNING: this is going to be another of those posts in which i am too lazy to capitalize things)

4th term has begun! it's only been a week, so why does spring break seem so long ago? i guess school has that effect on you...? still, there's no afternoons, and only 2 out of my 3 classes are going to involve actual work. well, that last is an assumption--i mean, i still have IJ--we spent T/Th this week doing the last 2 chapters of the keigo book 待遇表現, which was really no work at all, tho it's not really clear what we're going to be doing next in that class. we're having a mini-発表会 next week though, so i have to write some kind of a speech between now and then. (pick a topic... pick a topic....)

Now, onto the hard stuff:
we've moved on to Meiji literature in bungaku, as of this term. (for those of you shaky on your japanese history, that's post-1860, after the collapse of the shogunate). on balance, not that long ago i suppose, but it's long ago enough that everything's written all weird! (T_T);; sort of along the lines of the way Shakespearean-era things use different spelling and stuff like that... it's not all that bad actually, just takes some getting used to. and this was my first time reading anything in that kind of Japanese--but once i got myself broken in, it felt pretty much the same as regular japanese. right now we're working on Natsume Soseki's 夢十夜 "Ten Nights of Dream," which i was actually super happy to get to read. i've read them in english in a j-lit class i took sophomore year at yale, tho that was long enough ago that i didn't remember much other than the fact that i liked them. but, for anyone who's read anything else by Soseki, they're (to my mind at least) very unlike any of his other works.
less fortunately, next up, according to Otake-sensei, is Higuchi Ichiyo and possibly Izumi Kyoka--both of whom are authors that, again, i've read in translation for j-lit classes at Yale, and really enjoyed--but who are apparently a bitch to tackle in the original japanese. Ichiyo especially, according to Otake, has a habit of using a variety of different spellings for her characters' names, within the same story. as well as another equally charming habit of writing single sentences that take up an entire page. i exaggerate not in the least. (ack!) before we even get to start reading her, we have to spend a whole class learning various techniques for "how" to read her works! お楽しみ。。。(please note the sarcasm)

on Friday i have my first 現代小説 "Modern novel" class, so i'll report on that later. the first reading was a Murakami Haruki short story (that i *swear* i've read before....) which was interesting and not too difficult. so hopefully that class stays fun.