Japanese Branch Report- 2014

On 29 November 2014, at the 18th General Meeting of the George Eliot Fellowship of Japan, three papers on George Eliot\u27s novels were read in the morning session. In the afternoon, a symposium on Eliot\u27s poems was held and in the evening session a keynote speech was given by Professor Minoru Kawakita. Chaired by Professor Kimitaka Hara (Nihon University), the morning session saw our first speaker, Masako Ishii (Kyoto University), discussing The Mill on the Floss from the standpoint of the destiny of Maggie Tulliver, especially in relation to her conflict with the socially restrictive norms of a provincial town in England. Entitled \u27Yearning for a Love\u27, her presentation clarified how the heroine\u27s vulnerability seems attractive to her cousin\u27s fiancé but the heroine nevertheless refuses to elope with him because of her sense of insecurity or her unstable identity that she has had since childhood. The second speaker, Takako Takamoto (National Fisheries University), spoke about \u27Moral Dilemmas in George Eliot\u27s Romola (1862-63) and Ian McEwan\u27s Saturday (2005)\u27. She pointed out the dilemmas both Henry Perowne (the protagonist in Saturday) and Savonarola (in Romola) have when each of them needs to make a political choice. She concluded that utilitarian solutions seem irrelevant when the life of a human being is at stake. Our third presenter, Hideo Takano (Komazawa University), talked about \u27The Cross-Cultural World of Bouddha\u27s Tale in Chapter 37 of Daniel Deronda’. In his reading of the novel, he argued that George Eliot has a universal-truth-seeking imagination and that leads to Deronda talking of \u27the transmutation of self\u27 in the same chapter. He concluded that George Eliot has a sense of mission as a writer which leads her to depict her protagonist as morally free to seek a better world