Download or read book My Name Is Sei Shonagon written by Jan Blensdorf and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is Sei Shonagon? The tenth-century author of The Pillow Book? A woman of mixed-race parentage, surviving life in modern Japan? Or a voice from behind a screen, reaching across centuries, linking them both? Just off a fashionable street in the upbeat heart of contemporary Tokyo, lies a fragment of another age - an old incense shop. Above it, in a room furnished with nothing but a simple paper screen, guests come to speak with the woman known as 'Sei Shonagon', hoping to find answers to the mysteries of their own bizarre lives. 'Sei Shonagon' seeks out beauty where she can find it - whether in her memories, or in traditional Japanese culture. As she grows older, the need to understand what she sees around her becomes a personal odyssey that affects the lives of everyone she encounters.
Download or read book The Pillow Book written by Peter Greenaway and published by Dis Voir Editions. This book was released on 1996 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Script of Greenaway's 1995 film, The pillow book, which was made as an homage to the 10th century story by Sei Shōnagon entitled Makura no sōshi, on which it is loosely based.
Download or read book Worlding Sei Sh nagon written by Valerie Henitiuk and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 2012-06-16 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Makura no Sôshi, or The Pillow Book as it is generally known in English, is a collection of personal reflections and anecdotes about life in the Japanese royal court composed around the turn of the eleventh century by a woman known as Sei Shônagon. Its opening section, which begins haru wa akebono, or “spring, dawn,” is arguably the single most famous passage in Japanese literature. Throughout its long life, The Pillow Book has been translated countless times. It has captured the European imagination with its lyrical style, compelling images and the striking personal voice of its author. Worlding Sei Shônagon guides the reader through the remarkable translation history of The Pillow Book in the West, gathering almost fifty translations of the “spring, dawn” passage, which span one-hundred-and-thirty-five years and sixteen languages. Many of the translations are made readily available for the first time in this study. The versions collected in Worlding Sei Shônagon are an enlightening example of the many ways in which translations can differ from their source text, undermining the idea of translation as the straightforward transfer of meaning from one language to another, one culture to another. By tracing the often convoluted trajectory through which a once wholly foreign literary work becomes domesticated—or resists domestication—this compilation also exposes the various historical, ideological or other forces that inevitably shape our experience of literature, for better or for worse.
Download or read book Topsy turvy 1585 written by Robin D. Gill and published by Paraverse Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1585, Luis Frois, a 53 year old Jesuit who spent all of his adult life in Japan listed 611(!) ways Europeans and Japanese were contrary (completely opposite) to one another. Robin D. Gill, a 53 year old writer who spent most of his adulthood in Japan, translates these topsy-turvy claims - we sniff the top of our melons to see if they are ripe / they sniff the bottom of theirs (10% of the book), examines their validity (20% of the book), and plays with them (70% of the book). Readers with the intellectual horsepower to enjoy ideas will be grateful for pages discussing things like the significance of black and white clothing or large eyes vs. small ones, while others with a ken to collect quirky facts will be delighted to find, say, that the women in Kyoto were known to urinate standing up, or Japanese horses had their stale gathered by long-handled ladles, etc., and serious students of history and comparative culture will gain a better understanding of the nature of radical difference (exotic, by definition) and its relationship with the farsighted policy of accommodation pioneered by Valignano in the Far East.
Download or read book My Name is Sei Shonagon written by Jan Blensdorf and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2003-11-10 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a small incense shop in modern Tokyo, amid the manic consumerism of cartoon-colored Shibuya youth culture, incense is still made in the ancient way—slowly ground by hand and matured over time. Above the shop, a young woman sits behind a painted screen, listening to men unburden themselves about their work-dominated lives. She calls herself “Sei Shonagon,†? after the eleventh-century woman who wrote The Pillow Book. This exquisite first novel is a Pillow Book for the twenty-first century; its “Sei†? is a young woman who, as a child, moved to Japan from America to live with her strict, tradition-obsessed uncle after the death of her parents, an American academic and a Japanese student. As the novel opens, “Sei,†? now a young woman, lies in a hospital bed, hearing sounds around her, unable to speak except silently to herself-"I don't even know if you are still alive…I’m going to talk to you anyway, tell you everything I remember.†? Thus her story unfolds, back to a dark past and toward an unimaginable fate.
Download or read book The Meaning of Sport written by Simon Barnes and published by Short Books. This book was released on 2007-09-02 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Takes you on a journey from the Olympic Games in Athens to the World Cup in Germany - via the Ashes series, the Ryder Cup, Wimbledon, and more. This book examines why sport holds us all in such thrall, how it uplifts and crushes us - and can seem to matter more than life itself.
Download or read book The Bellman written by and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Traditional Japanese Literature written by Haruo Shirane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 1292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional Japanese Literature features a rich array of works dating from the very beginnings of the Japanese written language through the noted age of aristocratic court life into the period of warrior culture. The anthology contains new translations of such canonical texts as The Tales of the Heike and generous selections from Man'yoshu, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, and Kokinshu. It includes a stunning range of folk literature, war epics, poetry, and n? drama, and an impressive collection of dramatic, poetic, and fictional works from both elite and popular cultures. Also represented are religious and secular anecdotes, literary criticism, essays, and works written in Chinese by Japanese writers. Arranged by chronology and genre, the readings are carefully introduced and placed into a larger political, cultural, and literary context, and the extensive bibliographies offer further study. Intended as a companion to Columbia University Press's Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900, Traditional Japanese Literature significantly deepens our understanding of Japanese literature as well as of ancient, classical, and medieval Japanese culture.
Download or read book The Certain Days of Abstinence written by Lala Heine-Koehn and published by Ekstasis Editions. This book was released on 1998 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Certain Days of Abstinence the poet assumes the voice of a Japanese courtesan of the Tenth Century. While time and differences of culture separate the two writers, the matters of the heart which form their subject matter are eternal.
Download or read book As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams written by Lady Sarashina and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1989-12-05 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born at the height of the Heian period, the pseudonymous Lady Sarashina reveals much about the Japanese literary tradition in this haunting self-portrait. Born in 1008, Lady Sarashina was a lady-in-waiting of Heian-period Japan. Her work stands out for its descriptions of her travels and pilgrimages and is unique in the literature of the period, as well as one of the first in the genre of travel writing. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book Unbinding The Pillow Book written by Gergana Ivanova and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eleventh-century classic, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is frequently paired with The Tale of Genji as one of the most important works in the Japanese canon. Yet it has also been marginalized within Japanese literature for reasons including the gender of its author, the work’s complex textual history, and its thematic and stylistic depth. In Unbinding The Pillow Book, Gergana Ivanova offers a reception history of The Pillow Book and its author from the seventeenth century to the present that shows how various ideologies have influenced the text and shaped interactions among its different versions. Ivanova examines how and why The Pillow Book has been read over the centuries, placing it in the multiple contexts in which it has been rewritten, including women’s education, literary scholarship, popular culture, “pleasure quarters,” and the formation of the modern nation-state. Drawing on scholarly commentaries, erotic parodies, instruction manuals for women, high school textbooks, and comic books, she considers its outsized role in ideas about Japanese women writers. Ultimately, Ivanova argues for engaging the work’s plurality in order to achieve a clearer understanding of The Pillow Book and the importance it has held for generations of readers, rather than limiting it to a definitive version or singular meaning. The first book-length study in English of the reception history of Sei Shōnagon, Unbinding The Pillow Book sheds new light on the construction of gender and sexuality, how women’s writing has been used to create readerships, and why ancient texts continue to play vibrant roles in contemporary cultural production.
Download or read book A Different Distance written by Marilyn Hacker and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Indie Next Selection for December 2021 A Ms. Magazine Recommended Read for Fall 2021 In March 2020, France declared a full lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr—living mere miles from each other but separated by circumstance, and spurred by this extraordinary time—began a correspondence in verse. Renga, an ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, is comprised of alternating tanka beginning with the themes of tōki and tōza: this season, this session. Here, from the “plague spring,” through a year in which seasons are marked by the waxing and waning of the virus, Hacker and Naïr’s renga charts the “differents and sames” of a now-shared experience. Their poems witness a time of suspension in which some things, somehow, press on relentlessly, in which solidarity persists—even thrives—in the face of a strange new kind of isolation. Between “ten thousand, yes, minutes of Bones,” there’s cancer and chemotherapy and the aches of an aging body. There is grief for the loss of friends nearby and concern for loved ones in the United States, Lebanon, and India. And there is a deep sense of shared humanity, where we all are “mere atoms of water, / each captained by protons of hydrogen, hurtling earthward.” At turns poignant and playful, the seasons and sessions of A Different Distance display the compassionate, collective wisdom of two women witnessing a singular moment in history.
Download or read book Essays in Idleness written by 吉田兼好 and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Buddhist priest Kenko clung to tradition, Buddhism, and the pleasures of solitude, and the themes he treats in his "Essays, " written sometime between 1330 and 1332, are all suffused with an unspoken acceptance of Buddhist beliefs.
Download or read book Little Labors written by Rivka Galchen and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In paperback at last: Rivka Galchen’s beloved baby bible—slyly hilarious, surprising, and absolutely essential reading for anyone who has ever had, held, or been a baby In this enchanting miscellany, Galchen notes that literature has more dogs than babies (and also more abortions), that the tally of children for many great women writers—Jane Bowles, Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Patricia Highsmith, Iris Murdoch, Djuna Barnes, Mavis Gallant—is zero, that orange is the new baby pink, that The Tale of Genji has no plot but plenty of drama about paternity, that babies exude an intoxicating black magic, and that a baby is a goldmine.
Download or read book The Housekeeper and the Professor written by Yoko Ogawa and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beautiful, brilliant and profoundly strange - discover Yoko Ogawa. He is a brilliant maths professor who lives with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive and astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him. Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory. 'Has all the charm and restraint of any novel by Ishiguro and the whimsy of Murakami' Los Angeles Times 'Beautiful...the extraordinary Yoko Ogawa casts her spell... This a tale which will leave the reader gasping' Irish Times 'A poignant domestic drama of tender atmospherics and stealthy education...rapturous' Guardian 'Written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water... Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen' New York Times
Download or read book The Unpunished Vice written by Edmund White and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ______________ 'I find it impossible to imagine anyone better read than White ... Wisdom and a certain kind of tenderness are to be found on every page' - Observer 'One of the great prose stylists of our time ... There are few paragraphs that pass by without an illuminating, wise or funny comment' - Tim Smith-Laing, Daily Telegraph 'A rallying cry for the pleasures of reading ... The best writers are energetic readers, constantly diving for buried treasure. Anyone who encounters this book is likely to emerge with something new and gleaming' - Financial Times ______________ Edmund White made his name as a writer, but he remembers his life through the books he read. For White, each momentous occasion came with books to match: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, which opened up the seemingly closed world of homosexuality; the Ezra Pound poems adored by a lover he followed to New York; the biography of Stephen Crane that inspired one of White's novels. White's larger-than-life presence on the literary scene lends itself to fascinating, intimate insights into the lives of some of the world's best-loved cultural figures. Blending memoir and literary criticism, The Unpunished Vice is a sensitive, smart account of a life in literature.
Download or read book Japanese Studies written by P. A. George and published by Northern Book Centre. This book was released on 2010 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers presented at the three day International Conference on "Changing Global Profile of Japanese Studies : Trends and Prospects", held at New Delhi during 6-8 March 2009.
