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Book The Red Thread

    Book Details:
  • Author : Bernard Faure
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 1998-10-26
  • ISBN : 1400822602
  • Pages : 345 pages

Download or read book The Red Thread written by Bernard Faure and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a Buddhist discourse on sex? In this innovative study, Bernard Faure reveals Buddhism's paradoxical attitudes toward sexuality. His remarkably broad range covers the entire geography of this religion, and its long evolution from the time of its founder, Xvkyamuni, to the premodern age. The author's anthropological approach uncovers the inherent discrepancies between the normative teachings of Buddhism and what its followers practice. Framing his discussion on some of the most prominent Western thinkers of sexuality--Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault--Faure draws from different reservoirs of writings, such as the orthodox and heterodox "doctrines" of Buddhism, and its monastic codes. Virtually untapped mythological as well as legal sources are also used. The dialectics inherent in Mahvyvna Buddhism, in particular in the Tantric and Chan/Zen traditions, seemed to allow for greater laxity and even encouraged breaking of taboos. Faure also offers a history of Buddhist monastic life, which has been buffeted by anticlerical attitudes, and by attempts to regulate sexual behavior from both within and beyond the monastery. In two chapters devoted to Buddhist homosexuality, he examines the way in which this sexual behavior was simultaneously condemned and idealized in medieval Japan. This book will appeal especially to those interested in the cultural history of Buddhism and in premodern Japanese culture. But the story of how one of the world's oldest religions has faced one of life's greatest problems makes fascinating reading for all.

Book Pandemonium and Parade

    Book Details:
  • Author : Michael Dylan Foster
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2009
  • ISBN : 0520253620
  • Pages : 310 pages

Download or read book Pandemonium and Parade written by Michael Dylan Foster and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monsters known as yōkai have long haunted the Japanese cultural landscape. This history of the strange and mysterious in Japan seeks out these creatures in folklore, encyclopedias, literature, art, science, games, manga, magazines and movies, exploring their meanings in the Japanese imagination over three centuries.

Book The Ise Stories

Download or read book The Ise Stories written by and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2010-07-31 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ise monogatari is one of classical Japan’s most important texts. It influenced other literary court romances like The Tale of Genji and inspired artists, playwrights, and poets throughout Japanese history and to the present day. In a series of 125 loosely connected episodes, the Ise tells the story of a famous lover, Captain Ariwara no Narihira (825–880), and his romantic encounters with women throughout Japan. Each episode centers on an exchange of love poems designed to demonstrate wit, sensitivity, and "courtliness." Joshua Mostow and Royall Tyler present a fresh, contemporary translation of this classic work, together with a substantial commentary for each episode. The commentary explores how the text has been read in the past and identifies not only the point of each episode, but also the full range of historical interpretations, many of which shaped the use of the Ise in later literary and visual arts. The book includes reproductions from a version of the 1608 Saga-bon printed edition of the Ise, the volume that established Ise iconography for the entire Edo period (1600–1868).

Book Japanese Women Poets  An Anthology

Download or read book Japanese Women Poets An Anthology written by Hiroaki Sato and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, Japanese women have excelled in poetry - from the folk songs of the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) compiled in 712 and the court poetry of the 9th to the 14th centuries, on through the age of haikai and kanshi to the 19th century, into the contemporary period when books of women's poems have created a sensation.This anthology presents examples of the work of more than 100 Japanese women poets, arranged chronologically, and of all the major verse forms: choka, tanka, haikai (haiku), kanshi (verse written in Chinese), and free verse. The poems describe not just seasonal changes and the vagaries of love - which form the thematic core of traditional Japanese poetry - but also the devastations of war, childbirth, conflicts between child-rearing and work, experiences as refugees, experiences as non-Japanese residents in Japan, and more.Sections of poetry open with headnotes, and the editor has provided explanations of terms and references for those unfamiliar with the Japanese language. Other useful tools include a glossary of poetic terms, a chronology, and a bibliography that points the reader toward other works by and about these poets. There is no comparable collection available in English.Students and anyone who appreciates poetry and Japanese culture will treasure this magnificent anthology. Editor and translator Hiroaki Sato is a past winner of the PEN America translator prize and the Japan-United States Friendship Commission's 1999 literary translation award.

Book Legacies of the Sword

Download or read book Legacies of the Sword written by Karl F. Friday and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1997-07-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western scholars and educators are generally far less familiar with the samurai in his original-and, ostensibly, primary-role as warrior and masters of arms than in his other functions as landowner, feudal lord, literature, or philosopher. Yet, any attempt to comprehend fully the samurai without considering his military abilities and training (bugei) is futile. With verve and wit, Karl Friday combines the results of nearly two decades of fieldwork and archival research to examine samurai martial culture from a broad perspective: as a historical phenomenon, as a worldview, and as a system of physical, spiritual, and moral education.

Book Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons

Download or read book Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons written by Haruo Shirane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Shirane discusses textual, cultivated, material, performative, and gastronomic representations of nature. He reveals how this kind of 'secondary nature, ' which flourished in Japan's urban environment, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment when it began to recede from view. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane also clarifies the use of natural and seasonal topics as well as the changes in their cultural associations and functions across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world."--Back cover.

Book Museographs

    Book Details:
  • Author : Caron Caswell Lazar
  • Publisher : eBookIt.com
  • Release : 2017-06-09
  • ISBN : 1456615718
  • Pages : 58 pages

Download or read book Museographs written by Caron Caswell Lazar and published by eBookIt.com. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite a current trend toward individuality and cultural disparity, the fact remains that we have powerful tools that unite us all — our collective imagination, hunger for explanations, and the artistic images that they inspire. Irrespective of geographical location or industrial advancement, people from every corner of the globe cling to the myths, legends and stories that have organized and continue to organize whole societies, dictated religious and moral ideologies, and explained the mysteries of the universe. Museographs' Art, Myth, Legend and Story invites you to indulge your mythic side! Develop a better understanding of the origins and purposes of these beloved creations, and familiarize yourself with the themes and characters that make them possible. Meet Tiddalik, the Australian frog who was so thirsty he drank all the water in the land, leaving nothing for his creature friends. The White Serpent, one of the most popular surviving Chinese legends, or taste Forbidden Fruit with an African tale that explains the origin of the serpent found in creation accounts. Peruse bold images such as Herakles on a Greek vase, the life-giving Toltec rain god, Tlaloc, and Benjamin West's painting, Noah Sacrificing After the Deluge. This issue is as visually striking as it is textually informative. It consolidates and impressive selection of cross-cultural myths, legends and stories accompanied by relevant and powerful images. As an integral reference tool or as a beautiful compendium for the art and story enthusiast, it supplies a list of additional myths, legends, stories, and artistic renderings found in other volumes of the Museographs collection.

Book Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan  1600 1900

Download or read book Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan 1600 1900 written by Gerald Groemer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-13 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a thoroughly researched and meticulously documented study of the emergence, development, and demise of music, theatre, recitation, and dance witnessed by the populace on thoroughfares, plazas, and makeshift outdoor performance spaces in Edo/Tokyo. For some three hundred years this city was the centre of such arts, both sacred and secular. This study outlines the nature of the performances, explores the social relations which lay behind them, and reveals vast complexity: an obligation of gift-giving on the part of observers; performers who were often economic migrants fallen on hard times; relations of performance to social class; a class system much more finely gradated than the official four caste system; and institutions of professional organization and registration, enforced by government, with penalties for unregistered performers. The book discusses how performing, witnessing, and rewarding performance were closely bound up with economy, society and government, how the interaction between various groups related to socio-economic advancement, how the system of street performance reinforced social control, and how the balance between different groups shifted over time.

Book Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field

Download or read book Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field written by Joshua S. Mostow and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-05-31 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, the first collection in English of feminist-oriented research on Japanese art and visual culture, an international group of scholars examines representations of women in a wide range of visual work. The volume begins with Chino Kaori's now-classic essay "Gender in Japanese Art," which introduced feminist theory to Japanese art. This is followed by a closer look at a famous thirteenth-century battle scroll and the production of bijin (beautiful women) prints within the world of Edo-period advertising. A rare homoerotic picture-book is used to extrapolate the "grammar of desire" as represented in late seventeenth-century Edo. In the modern period, contributors consider the introduction to Meiji Japan of the Western nude and oil-painting and examine Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) and the role of one of its famous artists. The book then shifts its focus to an examination of paintings produced for the Japanese-sponsored annual salons held in colonial Korea. The postwar period comes under scrutiny in a study of the novel Woman in the Dunes and its film adaptation. The critical discourse that surrounded women artists of the late twentieth-century--the "Super Girls of Art"--is analyzed, followed by a consideration of gender ambiguity and cross-gender identification in contemporary anime and manga. Contributors: Grunhild Borggreen, Norman Bryson, Chino Kaori, Doris Croissant, Ikeda Shinobu, Kim Hye-shin, Chigusa Kimura-Steven, Joshua S. Mostow, Sharalyn Orbaugh, David Pollack.

Book Cunning

    Book Details:
  • Author : Don Herzog
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 2008-03-17
  • ISBN : 140082706X
  • Pages : 208 pages

Download or read book Cunning written by Don Herzog and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Want to be cunning? You might wish you were more clever, more flexible, able to cut a few corners without getting caught, to dive now and again into iniquity and surface clutching a prize. You might want to roll your eyes at those slaves of duty who play by the rules. Or you might think there's something sleazy about that stance, even if it does seem to pay off. Does that make you a chump? With pointedly mischievous prose, Don Herzog explores what's alluring and what's revolting in cunning. He draws on a colorful range of sources: tales of Odysseus; texts from Machiavelli; pamphlets from early modern England; salesmen's newsletters; Christian apologetics; plays; sermons; philosophical treatises; detective novels; famous, infamous, and obscure historical cases; and more. The book is in three parts, bookended by two murderous churchmen. "Dilemmas" explores some canonical moments of cunning and introduces the distinction between knaves and fools as a "time-honored but radically deficient scheme." "Appearances" assails conventional approaches to unmasking. Surveying ignorance and self-deception, "Despair?" deepens the case that we ought to be cunning--and then sees what we might say in response. Throughout this beguiling book, Herzog refines our sense of what's troubling in this terrain. He shows that rationality, social roles, and morality are tangled together--and trickier than we thought.

Book The Konjaku Tales

Download or read book The Konjaku Tales written by and published by Kanji Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Konjaku Tales contains translations from the Konjaku monogatarish, the largest Japanese story collection, which dates from the early twelfth century. The original work contains more than one thousand tales from India, China, and Japan."

Book Tandai Sh shin Roku

Download or read book Tandai Sh shin Roku written by Ueda Akinari and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-02-06 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first complete translation of Tandai shŠshin roku, which provides the best source for an understanding of the eighteenth-century Japanese literary figure Ueda Akinari (1734-1809) – a man of many talents and wide-ranging interests: haikai and waka poet, writer of fiction, commentator on Japanese classical texts, doctor of Confucian medicine, keen student of history and botany, tea connoisseur and amateur potter. In this highly personal work dating from his last year, when he was almost blind and in poor health, Akinari allows his writing brush to wander at will, giving his unvarnished opinions on contemporary and historical people and events, commenting on various social customs, criticizing friend and foe alike, defending the existence of the supernatural and sharing his love of nature. Akinari’s candour, humour, curiosity of mind and impressive erudition make Tandai shŠshin roku an unusual and interesting text that has long deserved to be better known.

Book Legends of the Samurai

Download or read book Legends of the Samurai written by Hiroaki Sato and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative history of Japan’s elite warrior class separates fact from myth as it chronicles centuries of samurai combat, culture, and legend. In Legends of the Samurai, Hiroaki Sato examines the history of these medieval Japanese warriors, as well as the many long-standing myths that surround them. In doing so, he presents an authentic and revealing picture of these men and their world. Sato’s masterful translations of original samurai tales, laws, dicta, reports, and arguments are accompanied by insightful commentary. With incisive historical research, this volume chronicles the changing ethos of the Japanese warrior from the samurai's historical origins to his rise to political power. A fascinating look at Japanese history as seen through the evolution of the samurai, Legends of the Samurai stands as the ultimate authority on its subject.

Book National Union Catalog

Download or read book National Union Catalog written by and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 1032 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes entries for maps and atlases.

Book Fabricating Consumers

Download or read book Fabricating Consumers written by Andrew Gordon and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its early days of mass production in the 1850s, the sewing machine has been intricately connected with the global development of capitalism. Andrew Gordon traces the machine’s remarkable journey into and throughout Japan, where it not only transformed manners of dress, but also helped change patterns of daily life, class structure, and the role of women. As he explores the selling, buying, and use of the sewing machine in the early to mid-twentieth century, Gordon finds that its history is a lens through which we can examine the modern transformation of daily life in Japan. Both as a tool of production and as an object of consumer desire, the sewing machine is entwined with the emergence and ascendance of the middle class, of the female consumer, and of the professional home manager as defining elements of Japanese modernity.

Book The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese

Download or read book The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book AB Bookman s Weekly

Download or read book AB Bookman s Weekly written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: