The Silver Spoon by Kansuke Naka

Notes and Acknowledgments
    In the notes, the following books may be cited by author’s last name only:
    Definitions of Buddhist terms: Burton Watson, tr., The Lotus Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), and Philip B. Yampolsky, ed., Selected Writings of Nichiren (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
    Social references: B. H. Chamberlain, Things Japanese (or Japanese Things in the reprint edition: Tokyo: Tuttle, 1971); E. Papinot, Historical and Geographical Dictionary of Japan (reprint edition; Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972). Both originally published early in the 20th century, they often provide just the right sort of information for The Silver Spoon .
    Certain festivals: U. A. Casal’s Five Sacred Festivals of Ancient Japan: Their Symbolism and Historical Development (Tokyo: Sophia University and Tuttle, 1967), a Swiss businessman’s loving report on the go-sekku, the five seasonal turning points. Casal arrived in Japan in 1912 and lived there for fifty years.
    The translations of tanka from the One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets (Hyakunin isshu) : those by F. V. Dickins that appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1909. There are a number of English translations of this mini-anthology—Dickins (1838–1915) himself had made an earlier, completely different one, published in 1866. But his 1909 translations, complete revisions of his earlier attempts, came out about the time Naka wrote The Silver Spoon.
    Terms related to traditional Japanese clothing: Liza Dalby, Kimono: Fashioning Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
    Biographical details on Naka Kansuke and his relatives and friends, editions of The Silver Spoon , etc.: Watanabe Gekisaburō, ed., Naka Kansuke zuihitsu-shÅ« (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985); Tomioka Taeko, Naka Kansuke no koi (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 1993), and Horibe Isao, “Gin no saji” kō (Tokyo: Kanrin Shobō, 1993).
    In this book all Japanese names are given the Japanese way, with the family name first, except on the cover and on the title and copyright pages.
    I started translating The Silver Spoon toward the end of the 1960s with Sondra Meadow Castile; ten of the episodes we worked on were then printed in the March 1972 issue of Doshisha Literature: A Journal of English Literature and Philology.
    I thank the late erudite scholar Kyoko Selden (1936–2013) for interpreting many expressions and passages of The Silver Spoon for me; the poet Ishii Tatsuhiko for information on the publishing history of the memoir from Iwanami Shoten and Hirata Shigeru and Kakizaki Shōko for acquiring necessary books.
    The novelist Dianne Highbridge and the scholar Gustav Heldt read the translation and made suggestions. Jenefer Coates copyedited it with unusual meticulousness and thoroughness.
    Hisako Fujishima designed the cover and Yano Sumiko worked out the many lovely illustrations.
    I thank the late poet Robert Fagan (1935–2009) for reading my translations for nearly forty years and, above all, my wife Nancy, the primary reader of whatever I write in English.
    H IROAKI S ATO

PART ONE

PART TWO

Bibliography
    Aketa Tetsuo. Edo 100,000-nichi zen-kiroku . Tokyo: YÅ«zankaku, 2003.
    Akita, George. Foundations of Constitutional Government in Modern Japan, 1868–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
    Baba Kochō. Meiji no Tōkyō. Tokyo: Shakai Shisō Sha, 1992; originally, 1942.
    Casal, U. A. Five Sacred Festivals of Ancient Japan: Their Symbolism and Historical Development. Tokyo: Sophia University and Tuttle, 1967.
    Chamberlain, B. H. Japanese Things [original title: Things Japanese ] . Reprint edition. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1971.
    Dalby, Liza. Kimono: Fashioning Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
    Dickins, Frederick Victor. “A Translation of the Japanese Anthology known as Hyakunin Isshiu.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1909), pp. 357–91, .
    Donald Keene, ed. Modern Japanese