ウラジミール・ナボコフ [NABOKOV, Vladimir]; 大久保康雄 [Yasuo ÔKUBO] (translator); 東郷 青児 [Seiji TŌGŌ] (illustrator). ロリータ [Lolita]. Tokyo: 河出書房新社版 [Kawade Shobo Shinsha Edition]. 1959.
8vo. Original cream paper-covered boards, lettered to spines in red (Vol. I) and blue (Vol. 2), coloured endpapers, title pages illustrated and lettered in grey and red, illustrated dustwrappers; pp. 260, [4]; 290, [1]; boards toned to edges, with a few scattered spots, light staining to upper edge of spines (c. 2-3 cm), light spotting to page block edges, upper edge of page blocks toned, dustwrappers with light edgewear, short closed tear to upper edge of Vol. 2 front panel; a bright, near fine set.
Attractive copies of the striking two-volume first Japanese edition of Lolita, with dustwrappers, frontispieces, and coloured endpapers by the distinguished Japanese artist, Seiji Tōgō (1897-1978), known for “creat[ing] a new vision for the ideal modern feminine presence”.
Among the most maligned, misunderstood – and also greatest – novels of the last century, Lolita needs little introduction. Completed in December 1953, it took Nabokov five years to write. Rejected by every UK and US publisher, it was eventually placed with Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in Paris and issued in a pair of green Olympia paperbacks in September 1955 (Beckett’s Molloy, a book which Nabokov admired, was issued by the press the same year). Initially receiving very little attention, at the end of the year, Graham Greene singled it out in the Sunday Times as one of his three best books of 1955. Due to legal wranglings (it was banned in the UK and subsequently in France), the first US edition did not appear until 1958 (becoming an immediate bestseller, for all the wrong reasons), the UK edition following in 1959.
The same year saw the publication of this first Japanese edition, translated by Yasuo Ôkubo and published in Tokyo by Kawade Shobô Shinsha Editions in two attractively designed volumes. The striking “nymphet” illustrations for the dustwrapper and frontispiece, as well as the vibrantly coloured endpapers, were executed by the distinguished Japanese artist, Seiji Tōgō (1897–1978), known for “creat[ing] a new vision for the ideal modern feminine presence” (Sompo Museum of Art). He studied in France and became active in the Italian Futurism movement. A member of the Nika Society, in later life he was awarded the Japan Art Academy Award and made an Officier d’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
According to Perry Hinton, there was “no parallel [to] the Western controversy [caused by the book] in Japan”, which he attributes to “the association of a young girl with an older man ha[ving] a long tradition in Japanese culture”. When asked in his 1967 Paris Review interview about his relationship to translations of his writings, Nabokov explained that “In the case of languages my wife and I know or can read – English, Russian, French, and to a certain extent German and Italian – the system is a strict checking of every sentence. In the case of Japanese or Turkish versions, I try not to imagine the disasters that probably bespatter every page” (Herbert Gold, who conducted the interview, spotted copies of the Japanese and Turkish editions on the author’s shelves).
In Japan, and to some extent the west, the name Lolita has now become synonymous with “Lolita Style”, a look which emerged during the 1980s, characterised by allusions to Victorian and Rococo design, doll-like cuteness and modesty. There is little consensus about the connection, or if there is any, between the style and Nabokov’s novel.
See Perry R. Hinton, “Returning in a Different Fashion: Culture, Communication, and Changing Representations of Lolita in Japan and the West”, International Journal of Communication, 7 (2013), 1582–1602. “Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40”, Interviewed by Herbert Gold, Paris Review, Issue 41, Summer-Fall 1967.
Juliar D28.ja.1.1; Field 0811.
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