Interface News Reporter |Pan Wenjie.Japan's ** home.Interface News Editor |Yellow Moon.
January 17, 1952 – March 28, 2023.
In 1978, Ryuichi Sakamoto debuted as a member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), which is known as a pioneer of electronic music in Japan. In the orchestra, Ryuichi Sakamoto's style is more academic and classical** – which is why composer Yukihiro Takahashi (who passed away on January 11, 2023) will refer to him as "Professor", a term that has since been widely used by fans.
Professor's ** is closely related to social concerns. Since his student days, he has been involved in social movements, participating in strikes** and demonstrations. He opposed the passage of Japan's Household Appliance Safety Law, which gathered more than 70,000 signatures, and actively participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations after the Fukushima nuclear accident. Later, Ryuichi Sakamoto actively participated in peace activities and initiated a forest restoration and conservation project. He believes: "When it comes to what ** and art can do for disasters, compared to sending food and donations, I think the highest level of what can be done is to think deeply about the meaning of disasters and express them with my own works." ”
In 1983, Ryuichi Sakamoto starred in Nagisa Oshima's film "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", which also included British rock singers David Bowie and Takeshi Kitano. The track of the same name has also become one of Ryuichi Sakamoto's classics. However, it will not be known to more Chinese audiences until he scored the film "The Last Emperor" and won the Oscar for Best Original Score, in which he played the role of president of the Japan-Manchurian Film Association. It was also when he was making this film that he came to China for the first time. Regarding China, Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote in his book "SKMT: Who is Ryuichi Sakamoto": "In 5 or 10 years, China will definitely become an existence that is difficult to ignore." The Chinese will certainly not go against their own logic. For better or worse, they will enhance the country's overall strength and push China's logical approach around the world. ”
Japanese writer and Nobel Prize winner in literature.
January 31, 1935March 3, 2023.
Wouldn't it be tiring to live like Mr. Oe?Mo Yan discussed with his friends in private, because he was "nervous, restrained, persistent, serious, always afraid of causing trouble to others, and always thinking about others everywhere". The result of the discussion was that Mr. Oe was indeed very tired, but Mo Yan said that it is precisely because of the "tired" people like Mr. Oe in the world that many precious qualities of human society, such as responsibility, courage, kindness, justice, etc., have been inherited and carried forward.
Wang Zhongchen, the translator of Kenzaburo Oe's long ** "Personal Experience" and a professor of the Department of Chinese at Tsinghua University, saw that most of Oe's early ** were about telling the absurdity and helplessness of life, but during the same period, he actively participated in social activities. At a time when Japan's right-wing ** led by Nobusuke Kishi forcibly ratified the "Japan-US New Security Treaty" and people from all walks of life set off a large-scale **, he actively participated in demonstrations and rallies and published articles such as "The Anger of Democracy" to criticize the atrocities that trampled on public opinion.
In June 1960, Kenzaburo Oe joined the third delegation of Japanese writers to China and came to China, which had no diplomatic relations with Japan. Since the 90s of the last century, he has repeatedly made statements in public, believing that Japan must face up to its aggression of that year, but has not received a response from Japan. In 1994, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels "Personal Experience" and "Football in the First Year of Wanyan", in which he listed Nanjing as one of the three major humanitarian disasters of mankind in the 20th century, urging Japan to get rid of the "ambiguous" attitude, bravely admit historical sins, and return to "Asians in Asia". However, he did not let his ** fall into the clichés of shallow politics**. Mo Yan said that Da Jiang is not preaching, but speculative - there is a huge speculative power in many of his **, and the characters are often in a fierce ideological confrontation, "It is a real polyphony with the style of Dostoevsky."
Home in the UK.
August 25, 1949 – May 19, 2023.
Flaubert the newborn, Joyce the reincarnate," said Nobel laureate Saul Bellow about Martin Amis. He was born in 1949 into a literary family in Oxford, the son of Kingsley Amis. Martin Amis, along with Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, is known as the "Big Three" of British literature.
Amis is best known for "Money", "London Venue" and "The Hidden News", often referred to as his "London Trilogy". While the books have little in common in terms of plot and narrative, they all examine the lives of middle-aged men and explore Britain at the end of the 20th century. Amis says he doesn't pay attention to a sensational new book written by a 25-year-old genius because "it's very uneconomical to allocate my reading time to that kind of new book." The new book may have the potential to become a classic in the future, but it may also be quickly forgotten, so he doesn't want to risk it.
Interestingly, when he debuted, he was such a genius in his mouth, and he wrote a sensational ** - won the Maugham Literary Prize for his first work "The Rachel Papers", and was hailed as a "literary genius". Since then, he has entered the literary world with a series of works with a variety of styles: "Money" was selected as one of the "100 Best English**" by Time magazine;"Time Arrow" and "Yellow Dog" were nominated for the Booker Prize. Although Amis never won a Booker Prize, it did not detract from his position as one of Britain's most popular young writers, as voted by Grant Magazine.
Writer and Pulitzer Prize winner.
July 20, 1933 – June 13, 2023.
Cormac McCarthy is often compared to William Faulkner, because McCarthy's ** also has a broad Old Testament style and rural background, and the literary themes are as bleak and violent as Faulkner's. In his works, characters such as wanderers, thieves, and prostitutes appear in desolate and formidable run-down borders, all of whom cannot escape their predestined fate before they were born.
McCarthy's early work generally received positive reviews but was not commercially successful. "Scarlet Meridian" was a turning point in his work, ranking third in the New York Times' list of "America's Best of the Last 25 Years." The first book in the "Frontier Trilogy" about the lamentation of cowboys in the American West, "The Horses of the World", caused a sensation in the book industry, winning the National Book Award and the National Book Review Award. In the third book in the series, Cities on the Plains, McCarthy writes, "The death of each man is a substitute for and a postponement of the death of others. Everyone is going to die, so no one isn't afraid. Only love for the one who died first in our place can alleviate our fear of death a little. His "No Country for Old Men," which tells the story of a misguided drug deal in the Texas desert, was later adapted into a film by the Coen brothers. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. His book The Long Road won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.
Legendary American publisher and editor.
April 29, 1931 – June 14, 2023.
Not just an editor, but a one-of-a-kind editor", "I've never met an editor like him, no matter what country he is in." - John Le Carre, a well-known British spy writer, once praised Robert Gottlieb in an interview.
Gottlieb was a legendary American editor of the second half of the 20th century, studied at Columbia University and then Cambridge University, worked for Simon Schuster, Knauf, and later the New Yorker. Le Carré said that Gottlieb had his own unique editorial mark, that the wavy lines meant that the text might be too ornate, and that the ellipses and question marks suggested that the writer could think twice about how to write better.
In 2016, Gottlieb published his memoir, I Believe in Reading, in which he reflected on the beauty and pain of being with words. In his book, he writes, "Some editors are always ashamed that they are not writers. My writing is good, and anyone with an education can be like me. But writing is very, very hard, I really don't like writing, and reading is as easy as breathing. He added, "I don't know how I'm so sure, but I never doubt my judgment as a reader." Gottlieb was not only obsessed with reading and editing, but he was also adept at scouting young authors, creating marketing tactics and creating many publishing events, including determining the title of Catch-22.
Writer. April 1, 1929 - July 11, 2023.
As early as the end of the 80s of the 20th century, Milan Kundera's works were translated into China, and set off a wave of translation, reading, and imitation. In particular, his famous ** "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" has become a "spiritual book" for generations of young people. Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Wang Anyi, Bi Feiyu, and other great writers of the future were all loyal readers of Kundera.
Participation in the "Prague Spring" led to a general reckoning among the Czechoslovak intelligentsia. In 1975, Kundera went into exile in France, and in 1979 he was stripped of his then Czechoslovak citizenship. The French literary translator Yu Guangzhong once commented on the relationship between Kundera's creative context and his exile career at an event: "Kundera is a writer who has left his homeland, and writing in his mother tongue has to go through a lot of scrutiny. I always felt that he had a knot in his heart that could not be untied - after arriving in France, he emphasized his identity as a ** family more than a dissident. ”
Zhao Wuping, vice president of Shanghai Translation Publishing House, sees that Chinese readers like Kundera probably because his work resonates with China's modernization in the past 50 years and the changes in Chinese readers' thinking. We all come from socialist countries, we are all affected by the changes in the ideology of the former Soviet Union or Russia, and we have regained our own orientation and development process. In this process, there are similarities in the changes in people's feelings and thoughts. Although Kundera entered the public eye as a politically sensitive figure back then, "Chinese readers still have a persistent love for him today, and generations of readers have loved him, so to speak, that his work is inspired by the human level."
Japanese mystery writer.
January 2, 1933 - July 24, 2023.
"Honorary Citizen of Harbin" is one of the honors that Seiichi Morimura has received in his lifetime. As a mystery writer, his works have been repeatedly put on the screen and become popular in theaters, especially after the film version of "Proof of the Wild" starring Ken Takakura, his **circulation has broken the historical sales record of Japanese detective reasoning**. But Seiichi Morimura was not satisfied.
In order to write the book "The Devil's Food", Seiichi Morimura investigated and searched for the former members of Unit 731 in various parts of Japan, traveled to dozens of cities, obtained a large number of testimonies through interviews with 31 former team members, and went to China and the United States to collect many extremely precious 731 history**, archives and materials. Published in 1981, the book sold more than 3 million copies in Japan, causing great shock and widespread concern in Japan and even the international community. The book was also evaluated as a pioneer in the study of Unit 731 by Takao Matsumura, professor emeritus of Keio University in Japan, in "Methods of Verification and Teaching of Historical Facts".
In the mid-80s, Seiichi Morimura wrote "Proof of New Humanity" in the form of reasoning. In **, a Chinese female translator who went to Japan to look for her daughter was suddenly poisoned and died in the middle of the night, and he used this as a guide to once again expose Japan's militarist crimes.
He is an American historian and an expert in modern Chinese history.
1953 - October 14, 2023.
The Institute of History of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences keeps two records of Han Qilan's exchanges: "Ms. Han Qilan, an American student, visited our institute" (1980) and "Ms. Han Qilan wrote a letter about the difficulty of finding a job" (1983). Han's research and teaching focus is on modern China, with a particular focus on labor and gender issues. As a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, she was one of the first batch of graduate students to have the opportunity to conduct research in the People's Republic of China. She spent several years in Shanghai researching the history of women cotton mill workers in pre-revolutionary China and published a book on how global and local factors affected the working class in Shanghai.
Her subsequent research and writing on topics include the changing gender structure of late 20th-century China, the tensions of origin among the Shanghai working class, and the history of educated youth. In China, Han Qilan's most notable book is The Subei in Shanghai, in which she finds that the identity of the Subei people is constructed by the Jiangnan elite in Shanghai, explaining how the origin constructs social hierarchies and social antagonisms. The book was published in Chinese in 2004 and is now worth more than 300 yuan on the Confucius Used Books website, and it is reported that it will be reprinted in 2024.
Canadian-American historian.
November 8, 1928October 21, 2023.
Davis is the second female president of the American Historical Association (the first being Nellie Nelson). Her best-known book, The Return of Martin Gale, stems from her experience as a consultant to the history of Daniel Vigne's eponymous film. In the summer of 1560, if it weren't for a man with a wooden leg who broke into the courtroom, the shrewd peasant, whose real name was Arnaud Dietier, would have almost convinced the judges of the High Court of Toulouse that he was Martin Gale. Dietier was eventually sentenced to death by hanging and cremated. The book was first published in French in 1982, and at the same time as the film premiered, it also made her a "pioneer in microhistory".
In the field of history, Davis is known for her ability to reconstruct stories centered on ordinary people from overlooked sources, but she is also committed to interdisciplinary history, combining history with disciplines such as anthropology, ethnography, and literary theory. This year, her "Women on the Margins: Three Life Stories of the Seventeenth Century" is also available in Chinese.
Historian of law and author of "Montayu".
1929 - November 22, 2023.
The Annals school emphasizes holistic history and structured historical research, and does not establish a research orientation of historical anthropology. Leveraduri's first work, The Peasants of Languedoc, was also a "history without characters", but Montayou, published in 1975, became a landmark work in the historical anthropology of the Annals school. Since the publication of this work, micro-historiography or the history of everyday life, including the study of the history of mentality, has become the focus of Leveraduri's research.
"Truffle hunters" and "parachutists" are Lehualaduri's classifications of historians. Truffle hunters study strange, novel and unexpected cases that, despite their uniqueness, illuminate the era to which they belong;Skydivers take a panoramic view, emphasizing the big trends rather than the details. Lehua Laduri is also a foodie in life, so he classifies himself as a more "truffle hunter".
There are three classic masterpieces of microhistoriography, namely Emmanuel Lehualaduri's "Montayu", Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg's "Cheese and Maggots", and American scholar Natalie Zemon Davis's "The Return of Martin Gale".
Historian of political thought.
1924 - December 13, 2023.
For a long time, Machiavelli was considered to be the "best teacher", and Leo Strauss also thought so in works such as "Natural Rights and History" and "Reflections on Machiavelli", and John Pocock could not bear such assertions, and finally adopted the polemical name "Machiavellian moment" as the title of his masterpiece.
Pocock saw that the founding principles and "teachings" of the United States have roots in the history of thought. Because Machiavelli focused on the ideals of citizen participation and militia thought in the classical era, and the pursuit of the common good, the Atlantic republican tradition originated in the "Machiavellian moment" from the perspective of the republican. In the '60s and early '70s of the twentieth century, he (introduced the "language" of political thought) formed the "Cambridge School" with historians and historians of ideas Quentin Skinner (who advocated a focus on authorial intent) and John Dunn (who emphasized biography).
Italian philosopher and political theorist.
August 1, 1933 - December 16, 2023.
Isn't he in prison because he is an intellectual?"Faced with the imprisonment of Negri in the last century, the philosopher Michel Foucault said. Negri was the leader of the Italian workers' autonomy movement in the 60s and 70s of the 20th century and one of the main theorists of workers' autonomy Marxism, and Italy** sentenced him to 30 years in prison for "incitement". The French philosophers Guattari and Deleuze expressed their views on Negri's imprisonment. At the end of the 80s of the 20th century, Italian ** Francisco Corsiga described him as "a psychopath" who "poisoned the minds of a whole generation of young Italians".
Negri also co-authored with Michael Hart in the tetralogy of Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth, and Assembly, which uses the concept of "empire" to describe a new political order of the decentralized, borderless, supra-national state of globalization, and the concept of "multitude" to describe a new political order that is under an "imperial" order. and rebelled against the historical subjects of the "empire". As for the "Empire", they neither described it indifferently nor made a show of the "Empire", but tried to dissect the operating mechanism of the "Empire", so as to make a theoretical prospect for the eventual transcendence of the "Empire".
Sinologist. 1938 - December 19, 2023.
In order to "figure out how our lives have come to be the way they are," he began studying history. His first monograph, The Historical Road of China (1973), a study of the history of premodern China and technology, developed the famous theory of the high equilibrium trap, which had a profound influence on the field of Chinese studies in the West. He argues that pre-industrial production methods are extremely effective in China, reaching their limits without industrial-scientific inputs, which removes much of the economic pressure on scientific progress.
In his book The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, which is regarded as a foundational work for Western scholars to write about China's environmental history, he argues that environmental degradation in China on the eve of the eighteenth century may have been more severe than in northwestern Europe at the time. In 2005, he won the "Julian Prize", which is known as the Nobel Prize in Sinology for this book.