Miscellanies on Katherine Mansfield

Abstract

I have written these pieces to remain memorandums for what I thought and reseached about Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), an author of short stories born in New Zealand, since I started to read her works as a Japanese reader and held many questions or sympathy to her. I named them miscellanies because they are not literary studies nor essays. Here I have collected pieces relating to Japan to some extent. 1. Mansfield and Sei Shonagon Among many Japanese readers of Katherine Mansfield there would be persons who feel like me that she had something in common with Sei Shonagon, female essayist of Japan, lived 10th century and wrote Pillow Book. It seems very queer that one can find similality between two women who lived far apart in time and place. But we can find certainly the same sharp sensibility, brilliant wit and love to the nature between these two writers. For example, Katherine Mansfield wanted to be always crystal clear when she was writing stories and Sei Shonagon had a liking for clearness of crystal and ice. 2. Swallows like Japanese thoughts In her first book of short stories, In a German Pension (1911), Katherine Mansfield wrote a conversation scene in Modern Soul where she described swallows like a little floak of Japanese thoughts. Were there any books about Japanese thoughts, especially written in English by Japanese authors in these days this work was created? Research on this subject brings us a few works being considered as adequate. Katherine Mansfield had read these few books until she wrote this story.