Japanese Heights

We recently had a young Japanese tourist in tears at the back of St Michael’s, overwhelmed to be at the site at which Emily Brontë is buried.  A local Blue Badge guide reminded me yesterday of how equally upset such a visitor might be to find they had come at a season when the heather on the moors is not in flower.  A resident of a hamlet on those moors told me a few weeks ago about periodically rescuing such inappropriately dressed tourists in bad weather near her home.  The paths between here and there are mainly marked with signs in Japanese as well as English in an attempt to prevent this happening too often.

After a year here, I get ever keener to find a way of understanding how Wuthering Heights in particular captures the imagination of those from a Japanese culture, all the time wary of too easy a stereotype simply asserting that there is something about the combination of romance and tragedy which is the hook.  Those in tears, with a heather laden fantasy or simply lost do appear to be among those who have been compelled by something ever since their first often adolescent reading of the book as a set text.

Emily’s 200^th birthday at the end of this month has prompted the Brontë Society to put on some local events which have hinted at how much more there is to understand about this.  One alluded to Japanese “kaidan” (haunted tales) as a tradition to which parts of Wuthering Heights might coincidentally appear to belong.

The critic Damian Flanigan spoke of the huge impact of Edmund Blunden’s identification in A Wanderer in Japan of the three most important English works (apparently such lists of three have a particular impact in Japan) as King Lear, Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights.  He noted, alongside their variety, their dealing with descent into tragedy.  He named the tensions between stoical endurance and unfettered imagination, between conformity and the wish to tear off the mask of falsehood, as possible features of Japanese culture to which Wuthering Heights speaks.

One of my father's aunts was a high church missionary in Japan before the First World War and I once read some of her reports home in SPG's archive held at Rhodes House in Oxford; I spent a fruitless hour earlier in the week trying to locate my notes.  She'd been taught to play music by Elgar (an unremarkable fact since his early career included much basic teaching around Worcester where she was sent to school) and I do remember her mentioning teaching Japanese girls in her turn; being taught at one remove from Elgar makes quite a contrasting cultural experience.

Meanwhile, the pictures come from the very English Cross Roads Gala today (at which I unwisely undertook the dangerous task of judging the fancy dress competition).