Asako Yuzuki is beloved in Japan and Korea for her “Akko-chan” series of classic reading essays. She revisits world classics that she read as a child or put off reading for one reason or another, but wanted to read, from her own unique perspective.
Wanting to introduce “long, steady, and regular” classics that everyone thinks they know but don’t actually know, like the “world masterpiece theater” of her memories, she covers 17th-century classics to modern classics, paying particular attention to heroines as a novelist who has always excelled in creating female characters.
<Jeanne from A Woman’s Life (Guy de Maupassant), Emma from Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), Nana from Nana (Emile Zola), Elizabeth from Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), Jane from Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), Hester from The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)…….
They are so famous that we think we know about them even if we haven’t read them, but do we really understand them as much as we are familiar with their names? Asako Yuzuki unabashedly reaches out to these archetypal heroines and recognizes them as they are, with all their strengths and flaws. Yuzuki Asako’s easygoing chatter about them, as if she were talking to a friend, brings these heroines back to life as human beings with blood pumping through their veins.
This page was last edited on 29 February 2024.