Download or read book Origins of Modern Japanese Literature written by Kōjin Karatani and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karatani Kojin is one of Japan's leading critics. In his work as a theoretician, he has described Modernity as have few others; he has re-evaluated the literature of the entire Meiji period and beyond. As one critic has said, Karatani's thought "has had a profound effect on the way we formulate the questions we ask about modern literature and culture ... [his] argument is compelling, moving even, and in the end the reader comes away with a different understanding not only of modern Japanese literature but of modern Japan itself." Among the many authors discussed are Soseki Natsume, Doppo Kunikida, Katai Tayama, and Shoyo Tsubouchi.
Download or read book Studies in Modern Japanese Literature written by Edwin McClellan and published by U of M Center for Japanese Studies. This book was released on 1997 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Studies in Modern Japanese Literature, twenty-two students honor their mentor, Edwin McClellan, with essays and translations focusing on literature from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. The authors discussed range from Natsume S seki to Murakami Haruki, and the subjects that are dealt with include the flourishing of literary forms in response to the Ansei earthquake, the impact of Western styles on Japanese literature, and modern poetry. Together with the translations of short stories, fables, and a critical essay, these contributions provide an overview of modern Japanese literary history. Contributors include: Paul Anderer, Carole Cavanaugh, Robert Lyons Danly, Eto Jun, Susanna Fessler, Elaine Gerbert, Ken K. Ito, Kyoko Kurita, Phyllis I. Lyons, Andrew Markus, Minae Mizumura, James R. Morita, Christopher Michael Rich, Jay Rubin, William F. Sibley, Stephen Snyder, Tomi Suzuki, Alan Tansman, Richard Torrance, John Whittier Treat, Dennis Washburn, and Angela Yiu.
Download or read book The Diving Pool written by Yoko Ogawa and published by Picador. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's bestselling and most celebrated authors From Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool--a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination--but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister's? A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg. Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature written by Rachael Hutchinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature provides a comprehensive overview of how we study Japanese literature today. Rather than taking a purely chronological approach to the content, the chapters survey the state of the field through a number of pressing issues and themes, examining the ways in which it is possible to read modern Japanese literature and situate it in relation to critical theory. The Handbook examines various modes of literary production (such as fiction, poetry, and critical essays) as distinct forms of expression that nonetheless are closely interrelated. Attention is drawn to the idea of the bunjin as a ‘person of letters’ and a more realistic assessment is provided of how writers have engaged with ideas – not labelled a ‘novelist’ or ‘poet’, but a ‘writer’ who may at one time or another choose to write in various forms. The book provides an overview of major authors and genres by situating them within broader themes that have defined the way writers have produced literature in modern Japan, as well as how those works have been read and understood by different readers in different time periods. The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature draws from an international array of established experts in the field as well as promising young researchers. It represents a wide variety of critical approaches, giving the study a broad range of perspectives. This handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian Studies, Literature, Sociology, Critical Theory, and History.
Download or read book Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature written by Tomoko Aoyama and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature, like food, is, in Terry Eagleton’s words, "endlessly interpretable," and food, like literature, "looks like an object but is actually a relationship." So how much do we, and should we, read into the way food is represented in literature? Reading Food explores this and other questions in an unusual and fascinating tour of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Tomoko Aoyama analyzes a wide range of diverse writings that focus on food, eating, and cooking and considers how factors such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and gender construction have affected people’s relationships to food, nature, and culture, and to each other. The examples she offers are taken from novels (shosetsu) and other literary texts and include well known writers (such as Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Hayashi Fumiko, Okamoto Kanoko, Kaiko Takeshi, and Yoshimoto Banana) as well as those who are less widely known (Murai Gensai, Nagatsuka Takashi, Sumii Sue, and Numa Shozo). Food is everywhere in Japanese literature, and early chapters illustrate historical changes and variations in the treatment of food and eating. Examples are drawn from Meiji literary diaries, children’s stories, peasant and proletarian literature, and women’s writing before and after World War II. The author then turns to the theme of cannibalism in serious and popular novels. Key issues include ethical questions about survival, colonization, and cultural identity. The quest for gastronomic gratification is a dominant theme in "gourmet novels." Like cannibalism, the gastronomic journey as a literary theme is deeply implicated with cultural identity. The final chapter deals specifically with contemporary novels by women, some of which celebrate the inclusiveness of eating (and writing), while others grapple with the fear of eating. Such dread or disgust can be seen as a warning against what the complacent "gourmet boom" of the 1980s and 1990s concealed: the dangers of a market economy, environmental destruction, and continuing gender biases. Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature will tempt any reader with an interest in food, literature, and culture. Moreover, it provides appetizing hints for further savoring, digesting, and incorporating textual food.
Download or read book Modern Japanese Literature written by Frank Jacob and published by Salem Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the developments of Japan's history, its economic and military rise in the early 20th century, and its bitter defeat after WWII. Essays in this volume explore the search for national identity. It covers works written between 1868 and today.
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 101 Modern Japanese Poems written by and published by Thames River Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable anthology features 101 modern Japanese poems by 55 poets, including Shuntarō Tanikawa, Minoru Yoshioka, Taeko Tomioka, Nobuo Ayukawa, Tarō Kitamura, Ryūichi Tamura, Hiroshi Yoshino, Noriko Ibaragi, Gōzō Yoshimasu and Yōji Arakawa, carefully selected by the renowned poet and literary critic Makoto Ōoka to ensure that the chosen poems express each poet’s special character. The collection provides a superb introduction to Japanese poetry from the immediate postwar period to the mid-1990s, and through these works one can sense the movement in poetry that reflected the challenging transitions and dizzying transformations occurring in postwar and contemporary Japan. Selected for inclusion in the Japanese Literature Publishing Project (JLPP) by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, this first-ever English edition has been translated by Paul McCarthy with both empathy and artistic felicity, and also includes a critical introduction by the Japanese poet and essayist Chūei Yagi. Suitable for both the student/scholar of modern Japanese literature and the general reader with a passion for poetry, the 101 poems in this authoritative collection will delight and inspire.
Download or read book Shock and Naturalization in Contemporary Japanese Literature written by Carl Cassegård and published by Global Oriental. This book was released on 2007-03-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study introduces the concepts of naturalization and naturalized modernity, and uses them as tools for understanding the way modernity has been experienced and portrayed in Japanese literature since the end of the Second World War.
Download or read book Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature written by Mina Qiao and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature examines selected contemporary Japanese writers and their use of fantastical spaces. Such spaces grant access to phenomena occluded from everyday life, including the geographically peripheral, the culturally marginalized, the psychologically liminal, and the physically intangible.
Download or read book New Writing in Japan written by 三島由紀夫 and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Pleasures of Japanese Literature written by Donald Keene and published by Companions to Asian Studies Series. This book was released on 1988 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces Japanese culture, and discusses the aesthetics, poetry, fiction, and theater of Japan
Download or read book Spirit Matters written by Philip Gabriel and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-02-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirit Matters is a ground-breaking work, the first to explore a broad range of writings on spirituality in contemporary Japanese literature. It draws on a variety of literary works, from enormously popular fiction (Miura Ayako’s Hyôten and Shirokari Pass and the novels of Murakami Haruki) to more problematic "serious" fiction (Ôe Kenzaburô’s Somersault) to nonfiction meditations on martyrdom and miracles (Sono Ayako’s Kiseki) and the dynamics of religious cults (Murakami’s interviews with members of Aum Shinrikyô in Underground). The first half of the volume focuses on the work of two women Christian writers, Miura Ayako and Sono Ayako. Combining a decidedly evangelistic bent with the formulas of the popular novel, Miura’s 1964 novel Hyôten (Freezing Point) and its sequel are entertaining perennial bestsellers but also treat spiritual issues—like original sin—that are largely unexplored in modern Japanese literature. Sono’s Kiseki (Miracles) and Miura’s Shiokari Pass focus on the meaning of self-sacrifice and the miraculous and survey both the paths by which people come to faith and the spiritual doubts that assail them. Perhaps most striking for Western readers, Gabriel reveals how Miura’s novel shows the lingering resistance to Christianity and its oppositional nature in Japan, and how in Kiseki Sono considers the kind of spiritual struggles many Japanese Christians experience as they try to reconcile their belief in a minority faith.
Download or read book The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies written by Michael K. Bourdaghs and published by U of M Center For Japanese Studies. This book was released on 2010-01-08 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1970s and 1980s saw a revolution in Japanese literary criticism. A new generation of scholars and critics, many of them veterans of 1960s political activism, arose in revolt against the largely positivistic methodologies that had hitherto dominated postwar literary studies. Creatively refashioning approaches taken from the field of linguistics, the new scholarship challenged orthodox interpretations, often introducing new methodologies in the process: structuralism, semiotics, and phenomenological linguistics, among others. The radical changes introduced then continue to reverberate today, shaping the way Japanese literature is studied both at home and abroad. The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies is the first critical study of this revolution to appear in English. It includes translations of landmark essays published in the 1970s and 1980s by such influential figures as Noguchi Takehiko, Kamei Hideo, Mitani Kuniaki, and Hirata Yumi. It also collects nine new essays that reflect critically on the emergence of linguistics-based literary criticism and theory in Japan, exploring both the novel possibilities such theory created and the shortcomings that could not be overcome. Scholars from a variety of disciplines and fields probe the political and intellectual implications of this transformation and explore the exciting new pathways it opened up for the study of modern Japanese literature.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature written by John Whittier Treat and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and pays special attention to the Japanese state’s hand in shaping literature throughout the country’s nineteenth-century industrialization, a half-century of empire and war, its post-1945 reconstruction, and the challenges of the twenty-first century to modern nationhood. Beginning with journalistic accounts of female criminals in the aftermath of the Meiji civil war, Treat moves on to explore how woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyō’s stories engaged with modern liberal economics, sex work, and marriage; credits Natsume Sōseki’s satire I Am a Cat with the triumph of print over orality in the early twentieth century; and links narcissism in the visual arts with that of the Japanese I-novel on the eve of the country’s turn to militarism in the 1930s. From imperialism to Americanization and the new media of television and manga, from boogie-woogie music to Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, Treat traces the stories Japanese audiences expected literature to tell and those they did not. The book concludes with a classic of Japanese science fiction a description of present-day crises writers face in a Japan hobbled by a changing economy and unprecedented natural and manmade catastrophes. The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature reinterprets the “end of literature”—a phrase heard often in Japan—as a clarion call to understand how literary culture worldwide now teeters on a historic precipice, one at which Japan’s writers may have arrived just a moment before the rest of us.
Download or read book Breaking Into Japanese Literature written by Giles Murray and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a graded reader for Japanese literature. There are 7 stories, 4 by Soseki and 3 by Akutagawa, representing 3 different reading levels. In each case the story is presented in Japanese and English with a running dictionary of terms used. An audio version of the stories is available as MP3 files on the Internet.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature written by Haruo Shirane and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature provides, for the first time, a history of Japanese literature with comprehensive coverage of the premodern and modern eras in a single volume. The book is arranged topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser known, popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective fiction of modern times. The various period introductions provide an overview of recurrent issues that span many decades, if not centuries. The book also places Japanese literature in a wider East Asian tradition of Sinitic writing and provides comprehensive coverage of women's literature as well as new popular literary forms, including manga (comic books). An extensive bibliography of works in English enables readers to continue to explore this rich tradition through translations and secondary reading.
