On the Bullet Train with Emily Bront

While teaching in Japan, Judith Pascoe was fascinated to discover the popularity that Emily Bronts novel Wuthering Heights has enjoyed there. Nearly one hundred years after its first formal introduction to the country, the novel continues to engage the imaginations of Japanese novelists, filmmakers, manga artists, and others, resulting in numerous translations, adaptations, and dramatizations. On the Bullet Train with Emily Bront is Pascoes lively account of her quest to discover the reasons for the continuous Japanese embrace of Wuthering Heights. At the same time, the book chronicles Pascoes experience as an adult student of Japanese. She contemplates the multiple Japanese translations of Bront, as contrasted to the single (or nonexistent) English translations of major Japanese writers. Carrying out a close reading of a distant countrys Wuthering Heights, Pascoe begins to see American literary culture as a small island on which readers are isolated from foreign literature.