本の読み方 スロー・リーディングの実践 | Week 6 📚

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本の読み方 スロー・リーディングの実践 | Week 6 :books:

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Week 6 14 Dec 2024
Sections to read 森鷗外
End page 155
Pages 24
Last Week 本の読み方 スロー・リーディングの実践 | Week 5 📚
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Spoiler Courtesy

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This week studies the 森鴎外 short story 高瀬舟. The excerpt is from the tail end of the story and the pre-excerpt introduction summarises its plot, so there are complete spoilers for the story and how it ends.

The full short story is about 15 pages long and is freely available on Aozora – you might prefer to read the story first in its entirety before starting this week’s chapter.

平野 also mentions 高瀬舟縁起, which is a short non fiction text about two pages long that 森 wrote about his inspirations and motivations for the story. Not by any means essential reading – 平野 summarises the key information from it in his introductory pages – but since it also is on Aozora I figured I’d link to it anyway. (It too has spoilers for the story, unsurprisingly.)

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One thing I thought was curious is not in the extract itself but at the very end of the story (it is briefly mentioned in the discussion section):

庄兵衛の心の中には、いろいろに考えてみた末に、自分よりも上のものの判断に任すほかないという念、オオトリテエに従うほかないという念が生じた。庄兵衛はお奉行様の判断を、そのまま自分の判断にしようと思ったのである。そうは思っても、庄兵衛はまだどこやらにふに落ちぬものが残っているので、なんだかお奉行様に聞いてみたくてならなかった。

My paperback copy has an endnote for オオトリテエ:

オオトリテエ : autorité （仏）権威。

It seems a bit anachronistic that Mori has put this French loanword into a story set in the Edo period, especially in a sentence that’s describing the inner feelings of one of the characters. I wonder why he chose to do that?

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Another thing I thought of that fits into the discussion of how Mori has carefully set up the story to present a “clean” case for the euthanasia question is that religion is not mentioned at all. That lets Mori present the situation as one of purely personal morals and choices, with no easy recourse to “well, the character’s faith means they should do X”. I don’t know about the actual historical situation, but the genre of Edo period fiction largely has characters unconcerned with faith and religious observance, so it works here. I do think it would be awkward to transpose the story to, for example, 17th century Europe, because you would get tangled up in the historical views of the church about suicide, and probably the next thing Kisuke would think of after fetching a doctor would be fetching a priest.

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Proper nouns

I just read オオトリテエ straight as an odd spelling, not necessarily English, of authority

It’s hard to guess guard’s age and age differences.

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If I had known had short the full story is I probably would have just read it all first before doing this section! But oh well.

I enjoyed the 平野さん’s full breakdown of how carefully set up the situations were to guide readers towards the 森鷗外さん’s intended message.

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