[nicklecompte]

Keep in mind that the novel itself was originally serialized, and the chapter in question (Nausicaa) is one of the easiest in the novel - further, the “obscene” part is right at the beginning of the chapter.

So this wasn’t a case of censors plumbing an 800-page novel and discovering something, or of a snippet being excerpted in newspapers - a scandalous specific issue of a literary journal started the whole controversy.

[Jun8]

Judge for yourself: Here's "Nausicaa" : http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Episo...

I personally found that calling this indecent is really pushing it. Maybe because it presented some light erotic ideas in an unexpected medium (a young girls stream of consciousness).

[jandrese]

Maybe its like how people called marijuana a "gateway drug", because after all of the breathless hype about how great it is and how it will immediately ruin you life, the people who tried it were mostly disappointed. If the authorities were so wrong about marijuana then heroin can't be that bad.

[nicklecompte]

I am certainly not saying it’s actually obscene or indecent! My point was that the scandalous bit was really quite prominent at the time of publication and not buried in an 800-page novel.

[totetsu]

Is this okay to open at work?

[pasabagi]

Very. I skimmed about halfway through and I guess the closest thing to eroticism that far in was a bit of blushing and some racy ankle descriptions.

[jandrese]

That makes sense. One constant of book censors is that they don't read very much, so normally as long as the juicy bits aren't right at the start of a novel it is safe.