On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë: ‘Wuthering Heights’ in Japan

Pascoe, who teaches English at Florida State University, decided to deep-dive into Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights during a year spent in Japan on a Fulbright Scholarship. Her fitful, unsatisfying account of her journey of exploration—of the novel itself, her uneasy relation to it, and its seemingly inexplicable popularity in Japan—does, however, raise important questions about how texts are transferred between cultures, and about why certain texts speak strongly to specific individuals and cultures. For one, Pascoe asks why there are comparatively few English translations of the great works of Japanese literature. She unevenly traverses the range of Wuthering Heights iterations in Japanese culture, including all-female plays, mangas, the Japanese subtitles for the 1939 Hollywood film version, and the numerous translations of the novel itself. She digs particularly diligently into Catherine Earnshaw’s passionate declaration “I am Heathcliff!”—which has proved difficult to translate into Japanese (she notes, “No single word in Japanese is equivalent to the English ‘I’ ”). While speculating about why Wuthering Heights has proved so fascinating to Japanese readers, she also ponders her own interest in a novel she admits she initially had trouble finishing, asking “Do we love hard books more than easy ones?” Pascoe may not provide fully satisfactory answers to any of the fascinating questions she asks, but she does a valuable service in asking them. (Dec.)