Download or read book Five Modern Japanese Novelists written by Donald Keene and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-22 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Yorker has called Donald Keene "America's preeminent scholar of Japanese literature." Now he presents a new book that serves as both a superb introduction to modern Japanese fiction and a memoir of his own lifelong love affair with Japanese literature and culture. Five Modern Japanese Novelistsprofiles five prominent writers whom Donald Keene knew personally: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo, and Shiba Ryotaro. Keene masterfully blends vignettes describing his personal encounters with these famous men with autobiographical observations and his trademark learned literary and cultural analysis. Keene opens with a confession: before arriving in Japan in 1953, despite having taught Japanese for several years at Cambridge, he knew the name of only one living Japanese writer: Tanizaki. Keene's training in classical Japanese literature and fluency in the language proved marvelous preparation, though, for the journey of literary discovery that began with that first trip to Japan, as he came into contact, sometimes quite fortuitously, with the genius of a generation. It is a journey that will fascinate experts and newcomers alike

Download or read book Five Modern Japanese Novelists written by Donald Keene and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2003 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Donald Keene offers a book that is both an introduction to modern Japanese fiction and a memoir of his own lifelong interest in Japanese literature and culture. Five Modern Japanese Novelists offers profiles of prominent writers whom Donald Keene knew personally: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo, and Shiba Ryotaro. Keene blends vignettes describing encounters with these famous men, autobiographical observations, and insightful, elegant literary and cultural analysis."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Five Modern Japanese Novelists written by Donald Keene and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-08-04 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A superb introduction to modern Japanese fiction as well as a memoir of his own love affair with Japanese literature and culture, this volume consists of chapters on five modern Japanese novelists whom Donald Keene knew personally: Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Ryotaro Shiba, and Kobo Abe. Each chapter opens with a vignette describing Keene's personal encounters with these famous men, blending his autobiographical observations with literary and cultural analysis.

Download or read book Modern Japanese Writers written by Jay Rubin and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first encyclopedia in the Scribner Writers Series to focus on Asian writers and genres. It highlights 25 of the most widely translated Japanese authors, such as Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, Junichiro Tanizaki and Fumiko Enchi.

Download or read book Modanizumu written by William J. Tyler and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-01-04 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remarkably little has been written on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Until now there has been neither a comprehensive survey of Japanese modernist fiction nor an anthology of translations to provide a systematic introduction. Only recently have the terms "modernism" and "modernist" become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-a-vis Western European modernism remain. This anomaly is especially ironic in view of the decidedly modan prose crafted by such well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro­. By contrast, scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced modanizumu as a key concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s. This volume addresses this discrepancy by presenting in translation for the first time a collection of twenty-five stories and novellas representative of Japanese authors who worked in the modernist idiom from 1913 to 1938. Its prefatory materials provide a systematic overview of the literary movement’s salient features—anti-naturalism, cosmopolitanism, the concept of the double self, and actionism—and describe how modanizumu evolved from its early "jagged edges" into a sophisticated yet popular expression of Japanese urban life in the first half of the twentieth century. The modanist style, characterized by youthful exuberance, a tongue-in-cheek tone, and narrative techniques like superimposition, is amply illustrated. Modanizumu introduces faces altogether new or relatively unknown: Abe Tomoji, Kajii Motojiro, Murayama Kaita, Osaki Midori, Tachibana Sotoo, Takeda Rintaro, Tani Joji, Yoshiyuki Eisuke, and Yumeno Kyusaku. It also revisits such luminaries as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and the detective novelist Edogawa Ranpo. Key works that it culls from the modernist repertoire include Funahashi Seiichi’s Diving, Hagiwara Sakutaro’s "Town of Cats," Ito Sei’s Streets of Fiendish Ghosts, and Kawabata’s film scenario Page of Madness. This volume moves beyond conventional views to place this important movement in Japanese fiction within a global context: an indigenous expression born of the fission of local creativity and the fusion of cross-cultural interaction.

Download or read book Modern Japanese Stories written by Ivan I. Morris and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 1961 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Five Faces of Japanese Feminism written by Ineko Sata and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exquisite collection of short fiction by Sata Ineko (1904–1998) offers readers a fascinating glimpse into the lives of women rarely dignified in fiction: glamorous café waitresses, feisty communist activists, a tortured novelist, a soldier’s wife, and single women in Japan’s Korean colony. Her delicately penned portraits challenge the tired, erotic tropes of the geisha and schoolgirl, while delving into the dilemmas women themselves faced in their personal and professional relationships. The stories and novella translated here span a period of two decades and the most important events and themes in twentieth-century history. “Café Kyoto” (1929) takes up the glamorous, if tragic, lives of café waitresses in the wake of the late 1920s Depression. “Tears of a Factory Girl in the Union Leadership” (1931) offers a unique portrait of a woman who works with the underground Communist Party. “The Scent of Incense” (1942), written as a work of “home front” literature, was meant to help mobilize women as productive workers and supportive housewives during World War II. “White and Purple” (1950), one of Sata’s rare postcolonial works penned just after the outbreak of the Korean War, reflects on the psychological damage inflicted on women during Japan’s occupation of Korea. Sata’s first novella, Crimson (1936–1938), joins a long tradition of women’s writing in Japan that sought to assert women’s “liberation” from what was seen as the oppressively patriarchal institution of marriage. Translator Samuel Perry’s critical introduction weaves the story of Sata’s life into an examination of the historical and cultural milieu that helped to generate her stories about working women, their lives in the workplace and in the home. As the celebrated author herself once wrote, “The kinds of womanhood available today exist precisely because literary masters of different ages and cultures have drawn us to them: the woman we pity, the woman with a heart of gold, the cruel woman, the clever woman, the hen-pecker, the cheapskate, and the ‘good wife wise mother.’ As terms we use to describe the kinds of women who exist in the world today, they have simply outgrown their usefulness.”

Download or read book Modern Japanese Novelists written by John Lewell and published by Kodansha. This book was released on 1993 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extending beyond the Western definition of "novelist" to include authors of works in the autobiographical "I-Novel" tradition and some of the most eminent practitioners of short fiction, this excellent author-by-author survey of Japanese fiction from 1885 to the present, with individual entries on 57 writers, was created especially with the reader of translations in mind. Appended to each essay is a complete and up-to-date list of English translations and critical studies. Includes a photograph of each author. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature written by Noriko Mizuta Lippit and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 1980. In twentieth century Japanese literature, the opposition and interaction of realism and romanticism on the level of literary concepts, and of Marxism and aestheticism (including, in part, modernism) on the level of literary ideology, supplies a most vital basis for writers searching for new methods of literary expression, fostering debates among the writers and creating the setting for active experimentation with style, form and language. This study is a result of an extended stay in the United States by the author who turned increasingly toward questioning and evaluating my own relation to Japan's literary heritage. For Japanese who have witnessed (at least intellectually) the violent attraction to and rejection of foreign cultures of many of their predecessors in the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras, and their final, often sentimental and abstract, glorification of the Japanese cultural heritage, nihon kaiki (return to Japan) still presents enormously complex intellectual as well as emotional problems.

Download or read book Japanese Women Writers Twentieth Century Short Fiction written by Noriko Mizuta Lippit and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection includes translated works by Japanese women writers that deal with the experiences of modern women. The work of these women represents current feminist perception, imagination and thought. "Here are Japanese women in infinite and fascinating variety -- ardent lovers, lonely single women, political activists, betrayed wives, loyal wives, protective mothers, embittered mothers, devoted daughters. ... a new sense of the richness of Japanese women's experience, a new appreciation for feelings too long submerged". -- The New York Times Book Review

Download or read book Modern Japanese Literature written by Donald Keene and published by . This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Japanese Literature is Donald Keene's critically acclaimed companion volume to his landmark Anthology of Japanese Literature. Now considered the standard canon of modern Japanese writing translated into English, Modern Japanese Literature includes concise introductions to the writers, as well as a historical introduction by Professor Keene. Includes: "Growing Up" by Ichiyo, a lyrical story of pre-adolescence in the 90s; Natsume's story of "Botchan," an ill-starred and ineffectual Huck Finn; Nagai's "The Sumida River"; Kokomitsu's Kafkaesque "Time"; Kawabata's "The Mole"; "Firefly Hunt"; a glimpse into Tanizaki's masterpiece "Thin Snow"; and the postwar work of such writers as Dazai and Mishima.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Modern Japanese Literature and Theater written by Scott J. Miller and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan opened its doors to the West and underwent remarkable changes as it sought to become a modern nation. Accompanying the political changes that Western trade ushered in were widespread social and cultural changes. Newspapers, novels, poems, and plays from the Western world were soon adapted and translated into Japanese. The combination of the rich storytelling tradition of Japan with the realism and modernism of the West produced some of the greatest literature of the modern age. Historical Dictionary of Modern Japanese Literature and Theater presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature_narrative, poetry, and drama_in modern Japan. This book offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Japanese literature.

Download or read book The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories written by Jay Rubin and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the great Japanese short story, from its modern origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable works being written today. Short story writers already well-known to English-language readers are all included here - Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata - but also many surprising new finds. From Yuko Tsushima's 'Flames' to Yuten Sawanishi's 'Filling Up with Sugar', from Shin'ichi Hoshi's 'Shoulder-Top Secretary' to Banana Yoshimoto's 'Bee Honey', The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories is filled with fear, charm, beauty and comedy. Curated by Jay Rubin, who has himself freshly translated several of the stories, and introduced by Haruki Murakami, this book will be a revelation to its readers.

Download or read book Tokyo Fragments written by and published by Stone Bridge Press. This book was released on 2004-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Tokyo Fragments, five of Japan's most popular contemporary writers of fiction present their vision of life in different quarters of Japan's capital. Spend a day with Ryota and Hiroshi on the mean streets of Shinjuku, spying on visitors to the local love hotel and sniffing glue in station toilets. Eavesdrop on the regulars at a bar in the old town as they fantasize about a fellow-customer who claims to work in the insurance business - but may be more experienced at taking life than insuring it. Join Eriko as she hunts for Mr. Right in trendy western Tokyo. Can you judge men by the same standards you apply to consumer goods? Maybe you can, but you'd better watch out for counterfeits!

Download or read book Accomplices of Silence written by Masao Miyoshi and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1974 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Two Japanese Novelists written by Edwin McClellan and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two writers, Natsume Soseki and Shimazaki Toson, invented the modern Japanese novel. Soseki is the eccentric novelist who appears on the 10,000 yen note. His contemporary, Shimazaki Toson, brought to Japanese fiction a lyricism previously seen only in poetry and nature writing.

Download or read book e and Beyond written by Stephen Snyder and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are the works of contemporary Japanese novelists, as Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo has observed, "mere reflections of the vast consumer culture of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large"? Or do they contain their own critical components, albeit in altered form? Oe and Beyond surveys the accomplishments of Oe and other writers of the postwar generation while looking further to examine the literary parameters of the "Post-Oe" generation. Despite the unprecedented availability today of the work of many of these writers in excellent English translations, some twenty years have passed since a collection of critical essays has appeared to guide the interested reader through the fascinating world of contemporary Japanese fiction. Oe and Beyond is a sampling of the best research and thinking on the current generation of Japanese writers being done in English. The essays in this volume explore such subjects as the continuing resonances of the atomic bombings; the notion of "transnational subjects"; the question of the "de-canonization" (as well as the "re-canonization") of writers; the construction (and deconstruction) of gender models; the quest for spirituality amid contemporary Japanese consumer affluence; post-modernity and Japanese "infantilism"; the intertwining connections between history, myth-making, and discrimination; and apocalyptic visions of fin de siecle Japan. Contributors pursue various methodological and theoretical approaches to reveal the breadth of scholarship on modern Japanese literature. The essays reflect some of the latest thinking, both Western and Japanese, on such topics as subjectivity, gender, history, modernity, and the postmodern. Oe and Beyond includes essays on Endo Shusaku, Hayashi Kyoko, Kanai Mieko, Kurahashi Yumiko, Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryu, Nakagami Kenji, Oe Kenzaburo, Ohba Minako, Shimada Masahiko, Takahashi Takako, and Yoshimoto Banana. Contributors: Davinder L. Bhowmik, Philip Gabriel, Van C. Gessel, Adrienne Hurley, Susan J. Napier, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Jay Rubin, Atsuko Sakaki, Ann Sherif, Stephen Snyder, Mark Williams, Eve Zimmerman.