A Bibliography of William Empsonʼs Japan and Japanʼs William Empson

This is the first bibliography of the poet, literary critic, and philosopher William Empson (1906-1984) in his relation with Japan. Empson arrived in Tokyo in May 1931 to take up a position as Professor of English Literature at Tokyo University of Literature and Science (Tokyo Bunrika Daigaku), and departed from Yokohama to return to England in July 1934. During the interim, as Japan was entering fully into a period of unprecedented turmoil, and Tokyo was shaken by earthquakes and political assassinations, Empson, inspired by seventh-century Buddhist sculptures in Nara and Kyoto, wrote the early drafts of Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) and The Face of the Buddha (2016).The bibliography draws on the work of three years by members of a research group affiliated with Tokyo Womanʼs Christian University, conducted in libraries and other institutions in Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, South Korea, China, and Sri Lanka. The results are presented in six sections.First is the 1,800-word technical introduction, which includes explanation of the principles of inclusion, organizational structure, and bibliographical conventions, the latter of which are a hybrid of English and Japanese, designed to make citations understandable to readers of both English and Japanese, or of either one but not the other.This is followed by the 7,600-word essay, ‘Empsonʼs Japan’, which more fully than any previous work traces the cultural history of Empson in Japan. The essay outlines the political milieu of Japan whilst Empson was in the country, documenting the political violence of Tokyo while he lived in the city, and includes details from primary sources that trace his activities and affiliations, including new details about the identity of the Japanese woman who appears in Empsonʼs most engaging poem of Japan, ‘Aubade’ (1933), with whom Empson had an affair serious enough that they considered marriage. Andō Haru, the presiding presence in Empsonʼs ‘Aubade’, is given a full name here for the first time in any critical work, and a history more complete than any that has come before.Following this is the bibliography itself in four bilingual sections. Section A, ‘Works by William Empson Published in English in Japan’ (17 entries), offers for the first time full details of Empsonʼs writing and publications while he was in the country, including details not before noted about his first book of poems, published in Tokyo in a limited edition of 100 in 1934, and of the first appearance of five central chapters of Some Versions of Pastoral, ‘Marvellʼs Garden ’and‘ The Double Plot in Troilus and Cressida’ in 1932, ‘Proletarian Literature’ and ‘They That Have Power’ in 1933, and ‘The Beggarʼs Opera’ published over nine issues of a Japanese literary journal in 1933 and 1934. These works have been noted before in Empson scholarship, but with details scrambled, titlesand dates wrong, to such a degree that this work is the first that will allow researchers actually to find them in libraries that hold them.Section B, ‘Japanese Translations of Empson’ (18 entries), offers the first full accounting of the subject, from early translations of Empsonʼs poems through two full translations of Seven Types of Ambiguity and the only Japanese translation of Some Versions of Pastoral.Section C, ‘Reminiscences of Empson and Related Works Published in Japanese’ (21 entries), offers the first full accounting of these primary documents, some not noted before in any work, others noted before but with errors in citation serious enough to impede finding the works in libraries that hold them.Section D, ‘Critical Works and Reviews of Empson Published in Japan’ (106 entries), offers the first and only systematic accounting of the critical reaction to Empson in Japanese.