Download or read book The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanshichi written by Kidō Okamoto and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-12-31 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "That year, quite a shocking incident occurred. . . ." So reminisces old Hanshichi in a story from one of Japan’s most beloved works of popular literature, Hanshichi torimonochô. Told through the eyes of a street-smart detective, Okamoto Kidô’s best-known work inaugurated the historical detective genre in Japan, spawning stage, radio, movie, and television adaptations as well as countless imitations. This selection of fourteen stories, translated into English for the first time, provides a fascinating glimpse of life in feudal Edo (later Tokyo) and rare insight into the development of the fledgling Japanese crime novel. Once viewed as an exclusively modern genre derivative of Western fiction, crime fiction and its place in the Japanese popular imagination were forever changed by Kidô’s "unsung Sherlock Holmes." These stories—still widely read today—are crucial to our understanding of modern Japan and its aspirations toward a literature that steps outside the shadow of the West to stand on its own.
Download or read book The Book of Tokyo written by Hideo Furukawa and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’
Download or read book Toddler hunting Other Stories written by Taeko Kōno and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disquieting stories exploring women's freedom & bondage in post-WWII Japan.
Download or read book Ten Nights Dreaming written by Natsume Soseki and published by Courier Dover Publications. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A murderer discovers his true nature from a talking infant, a samurai is frustrated in his attempts to meditate, and a dying man bestows his hat on a friend in these surrealistic short stories. The dream-like, open-ended tales by the father of Japanese modernist literature offer thought-provoking reflections on fear, death, and loneliness. Their settings range from the Meiji period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the era in which the tales were written, to the prehistoric Age of the Gods; the twelfth-century Kamakura period, in which the samurai class emerged; and the remote future. A scholar of British literature, author Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) was also a composer of haiku, kanshi, and fairy tales. The stories of Ten Nights Dreaming, which were originally published as a newspaper serial, constitute milestones of Japanese fantasy. Like Sōseki's other writings, they have had a profound effect on readers, writers, and filmmakers. This edition features an expert new English translation by Matt Treyvaud, who has translated the story "The Cat's Grave" for this work as well.
Download or read book Painting Nature for the Nation written by Rosina Buckland and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-12-10 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Painting Nature for the Nation: Taki Katei and the Challenges to Sinophile Culture in Meiji Japan, Rosina Buckland offers an account of the career of the painter Taki Katei (1830–1901). Drawing on a large body of previously unpublished paintings, collaborative works and book illustrations by this highly successful, yet neglected, figure, Buckland traces how Katei transformed his art and practice based in modes derived from China in order to fulfil the needs of the modern nation-state at large-scale exhibitions and at the imperial court. She provides a rare examination of the vibrant world of Chinese-inspired culture during the 1880s, and the hostility which it faced in the following decade.
Download or read book Things Remembered and Things Forgotten written by Kyoko Nakajima and published by Sort of Books. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination ... imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes'. So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo's insistently modern culture. The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are - by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.
Download or read book Keiko s Story written by Linda Moore Kurth and published by Millbrook Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the success of the Free Willy motion picture, children across the nation began a movement to set the starring whale free, and this book captures the story of Keiko's release and the great new life he lives in the world's oceans.
Download or read book Ashokan Farewell written by Jay Ungar and published by Mel Bay Publications. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 13 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ashokan Farewell" is best known as the plaintive theme from Kenneth Burns' highly acclaimed Civil War television documentary. In addition to Jay Ungar's authorized solo edition as performed in the documentary series, this folio contains the touching Civil War era "Sullivan Ballou Letter" and Lincoln's famed Gettysburg Address. Arranged for violin with piano accompaniment and suggested chord symbols for optional guitar and bass. Separate pull-out violin part.
Download or read book Ten Nights Dreams written by Sōseki Natsume and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ten Nights' Dreams is a collection of ten short stories or dreams. Among the ten nights, the first, second, third, and fifth nights start with the same sentence, "This is the dream I dreamed." Each dream has a surrealistic atmosphere. Some are funny, and others are grotesquely weird. Did Soseki try to express what he actually dreamed? Or was his subconscious emerging spontaneously in the form of narrative dream?"--Page 4 of cover
Download or read book Pathki Nana written by Kenneth Thomasma and published by Baker Publishing Group (MI). This book was released on 1991 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shy and lacking in self-confidence, eight-year-old Pathki Nana faces a difficult task when, according to Kootenai tribal custom, she must go alone into the mountains to seek a personal guardian spirit.
Download or read book written by 松尾芭蕉 and published by Kodansha. This book was released on 1996 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bilingual edition of The Narrow Road to Oku' features a translation by Donald Keene and original kiri-e illustrations by Miyata Masayuki. In the account which he named The Narrow Road to Oku, Basho makes a journey lasting 150 days, in which he travels, on foot, a distance of 600 ri. This was three hundred years ago, when the average distance covered by travelers was apparently 9 ri per day, so it is clear that Basho, who was forty years old at the time, possessed a remarkably sturdy pair of walking legs. Nowadays with the development of all sorts of means of'
Download or read book History of Popular Culture in Japan written by E. Taylor Atkins and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of 'Cool Japan' is one of the distinctive features of global popular culture of the millennial age. A History of Popular Culture in Japan provides the first historical and analytical overview of popular culture in Japan from its origins in the 17th century to the present day, using it to explore broader themes of conflict, power and meaning in Japanese history. E. Taylor Atkins shows how Japan was one of the earliest sites for the development of mass-produced, market-oriented cultural products consumed by urban middle and working classes. From traditional monochrome ink painting, court literature and poetry to anime, manga and J-Pop, popular culture was pivotal in the rise of Japanese nationalism, imperialism, militarism and economic development, and to the present day plays a central role in Japanese identity. With updated historiography throughout, this fully revised second edition features: - A new chapter on popular culture in the Edo period - An expanded section on pre-Tokugawa culture - More discussion on recent pop culture phenomena such as TV game shows, cuteness and J-Pop - 10 new images - A new glossary of terms including kanji This improved edition is a vital resource for students of Japanese cultural history wishing to gain a deeper understanding of Japan's contributions to global cultural heritage.
Download or read book Okamoto Kido written by Kido Okamoto and published by Kurodahan Press. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haunted flutes, ghostly visitors, three-legged frogs, the vengeance of a blinded man... Kidō's imagination ranged far and wide through the Japanese literary scene in the 1920s and 30s. He remains a major influence on modern horror writers in Japan today.
Download or read book Purloined Letters written by Mark H. Silver and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-04-07 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging study of the detective story’s arrival in Japan—and of the broader cross-cultural borrowing that accompanied it—argues for a reassessment of existing models of literary influence between "unequal" cultures. Because the detective story had no pre-existing native equivalent in Japan, the genre’s formulaic structure acted as a distinctive cultural marker, making plain the process of its incorporation into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese letters. Mark Silver tells the story of Japan’s adoption of this new Western literary form at a time when the nation was also remaking itself in the image of the Western powers. His account calls into question conventional notions of cultural domination and resistance, demonstrating the variety of possible modes for cultural borrowing, the surprising vagaries of intercultural transfer, and the power of the local contexts in which "imitation" occurs. Purloined Letters considers a fascinating range of primary texts populated by wise judges, faceless corpses, wily confidence women, desperate blackmailers, a fetishist who secrets himself for days inside a leather armchair, and a host of other memorable figures. The work begins by analyzing Tokugawa courtroom narratives and early Meiji biographies of female criminals (dokufu-mono, or "poison-woman stories"), which dominated popular crime writing in Japan before the detective story’s arrival. It then traces the mid-Meiji absorption of French, British, and American detective novels into Japanese literary culture through the quirky translations of muckraking journalist Kuroiwa Ruiko. Subsequent chapters take up a series of detective stories nostalgically set in the old city of Edo by Okamoto Kido (a Kabuki playwright inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes) and the erotic, grotesque, and macabre works of Edogawa Ranpo, whose pen-name punned on "Edgar Allan Poe.
Download or read book The Tattoo Murder Case written by Akimitsu Takagi and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kinue Nomura survived World War II only to be murdered in Tokyo, her severed limbs discovered in a room locked from the inside. Gone is the part of her that bore one of the most beautiful full-body tattoos ever rendered. Kenzo Matsushita, a young doctor who was first to discover the crime scene, feels compelled to assist his detective brother, who is in charge of the case. But Kenzo has a secret: he was Kinue’s lover, and soon his involvement in the investigation becomes as twisted and complex as the writhing snakes that once adorned Kinue’s torso. The Tattoo Murder Case was originally published in 1948; this is the first English translation.
Download or read book Washi written by Nancy Broadbent Casserley and published by Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washi, or Japanese handmade paper, has long held a central role in Japanese culture. The rich history and striking diversity of washi are explored in this extensively-illustrated book through images and discussion of two washi collections.
Download or read book Tokyo Roji written by Heide Imai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Japanese urban alleyway, which was once part of people’s personal spatial sphere and everyday life has been transformed by diverse and competing interests. Marginalised through the emergence of new forms of housing and public spaces, re-appropriated by different fields, and re-invented by the contemporary urban design discourse, the social meaning attached to the roji is being re-interpreted by individuals, subcultures and new social movements. The book will introduce and discuss examples of urban practices which take place within the dynamic urban landscape of contemporary Tokyo to portray the life cycle of an urban form being rediscovered, commodified and lost as physical space.
