Plus: The Slave Trade During Wartime; Kate Riley; The Meiji Restoration
| Today in The New York Review of Books: FT waits for Godot with Keanu Reeves; James Oakes tells the history of the slave trade as it continued during the Civil War; Joanna Biggs reviews Kate Riley’s fragmentary novel Ruth, and, from the archives, John K. Fairbank on the Meiji Restoration. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are inspired casting to lead Waiting for Godot, but the Broadway production amounts to Beckett with emotional subtitles. The survival of slave trading during the Civil War suggests that enslaved people remained valuable commodities in a time of economic upheaval. In Ruth, Kate Riley portrays the interior life of her title character with a richness that is at odds with Ruth’s austere Anabaptist community. Free from the ArchivesOne hundred and fifty-eight years ago today, the last shogun of Japan, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, tendered his resignation, clearing the way for the Emperor Meiji to take power two months later and inaugurate a period of rapid industrialization and Westernization in the country, what came to be known as the Meiji Restoration. In the Review’s April 14, 1983, issue, John K. Fairbank wrote about the turn of the century in Japan, toward the end of Meiji’s reign, when, with “Westernization” coming to include militarization and colonialism, the fledgling empire began a project of territorial expansion. Using the accounts of two Japanese men of the period—foreign minister Mutsu Munemitsu and philosopher-artist and ally of Sun Yat-sen Miyazaki Toten—Fairbank shows “how an island people poor in natural resources came from behind and have now almost got ahead of us in material technology.” “In a little over twelve months Japan became dominant in Korea; spectacularly defeated the Chinese army and navy, contrary to general expectations; and at the same time freed Japan of the unequal treaty system (which gave special advantages to Western nations and continued to impair China’s sovereignty for another half century)…. The Japanese empire had been born. The Anglo-Japanese alliance followed in 1902 (until 1922) and Japan defeated Russia in Manchuria in 1905. The rising sun shone over East Asia.” “Our perilous world-historical moment challenges writers and artists to unsparingly reconsider beliefs and allegiances formed during a morally complacent era. As in the 1930s and 1940s, this juncture calls for a fresh solidarity of the hopeful—those who neither accept the world as it is nor turn away from it but see it as something to be engaged with and ultimately transformed.” “Zohran Mamdani’s socialism is hardly going to starve us or serve up bland bummers. His three signature proposals—free and fast buses, universal childcare, and a freeze on rent hikes for the roughly 2.5 million New Yorkers in rent-stabilized apartments—are far from revolutionary.” Special Offer
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