The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Literature by Dennis Washburn
Published 2010 · 125,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Literary History
How hard is The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Literature to read?
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Literature scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Academic literary-critical vocabulary combined with Japanese literary terminology; each essay provides its own conceptual framework.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Abstraction: 74 out of 100
- Theoretical frameworks — postcolonial, gender theory, modernism studies — applied to Japanese literary texts with varying degrees of accessibility.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Very dense; each essay covers substantial bodies of texts, critical positions, and historical context within limited space.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Direct argumentative essays; each contributor states and develops a clear thesis.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- Analytical register throughout; critical rather than literary in mode.
- Ironic distance: 16 out of 100
- Measured scholarly tone; occasional irony about the Western reception of Japanese literature.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Each essay resolves its argument; the collection takes clear interpretive positions throughout.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Eighteen independent essays organized chronologically and thematically; can be read selectively but reward sequential reading.
How The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Literature is regarded
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Literature holds a literary regard score of 79 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.