Download or read book Travelers of a Hundred Ages written by Donald Keene and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once an intimate account of the diarists' lives and a testimony to the greater struggles and advances of Japanese culture, this book illuminates the hidden and largely unknown worlds of imperial courts, Buddhist monasteries, country inns, and merchants' houses.
Download or read book Seeds in the Heart written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 1284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Donald Keene, a noted authority in the field, offers a guide through the first 900 years of Japanese literature. This period not only defined the unique properties of Japanese prose and prosody, but also produced some of its greatest works.
Download or read book Travelers of a Hundred Ages written by Donald Keene and published by Henry Holt & Company. This book was released on 1989 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once an intimate account of the diarists' lives and a testimony to the greater struggles and advances of Japanese culture, this book illuminates the hidden and largely unknown worlds of imperial courts, Buddhist monasteries, country inns, and merchants' houses.
Download or read book Indo Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries 1400 1800 written by Muzaffar Alam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-02 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of Persian travel accounts, dealing with India, Iran and Central Asia between 1400 and 1800.
Download or read book Be a Woman written by Joan E. Ericson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1997-09-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joan Ericson's magnificent survey of writing by Japanese women significantly advances the current debate over the literary category of "women's literature" in modern Japan and demonstrates its significance in the life and work of twentieth-century Japan's most important woman writer, Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951). Until the early 1980s, the literary category of "women's literature" (joryu bungaku) segregated most writing by modern Japanese women from the literary canon. "Women's literature" was viewed as a sentimental and impressionistic literary style that was popular but was critically disparaged. A close scrutiny of Hayashi Fumiko's work--in particular the two pieces masterfully translated here, the immensely popular novel Horoki (Diary of a Vagabond) and Suisen (Narcissus)--shows the inadequacies of categorizing her writing as "women's literature." Its originality and power are rooted in the clarity and immediacy with which Hayashi is able to convey the humanity of those occupying the underside of Japanese society, especially women.
Download or read book Excursions in Identity written by Laura Nenzi and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-04-16 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Edo period (1600–1868), status- and gender-based expectations largely defined a person’s place and identity in society. The wayfarers of the time, however, discovered that travel provided the opportunity to escape from the confines of the everyday. Cultured travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote travel memoirs to celebrate their profession as belle-lettrists. For women in particular the open road and the blank page of the diary offered a precious opportunity to create personal hierarchies defined less by gender and more by culture and refinement. After the mid-eighteenth century—which saw the popularization of culture and the rise of commercial printing—textbooks, guides, comical fiction, and woodblock prints allowed not a few commoners to acquaint themselves with the historical, lyrical, or artistic pedigree of Japan’s famous sites. By identifying themselves with famous literary and historical icons of the past, some among these erudite commoners saw an opportunity to rewrite their lives and re-create their identities in the pages of their travel diaries. The chapters in Part One, “Re-creating Spaces,” introduce the notion that the spaces of travel were malleable, accommodating reconceptualization across interpretive frames. Laura Nenzi shows that, far from being static backgrounds, these travelscapes proliferated in a myriad of loci where one person’s center was another’s periphery. In Part Two, “Re-creating Identities,” we see how, in the course of the Edo period, educated persons used travel to, or through, revered lyrical sites to assert and enhance their roles and identities. Finally, in Part Three, “Purchasing Re-creation,” Nenzi looks at the intersection between recreational travel and the rising commercial economy, which allowed visitors to appropriate landscapes through new means: monetary transactions, acquisition of tangible icons, or other forms of physical interaction.
Download or read book Between China and Japan written by Joshua A. Fogel and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past thirty-five years, Joshua Fogel has pioneered the study of Sino-Japanese cultural and political relations—understood as the intersections of the histories of these two countries. This volume brings together many of his essays and reviews in this new field. For a variety of reasons discussed within, scholars have been reluctant to look at these two nation’s historical connections, either through comparative analysis or actual interactions. Fogel’s work has focused squarely here. Among the issues addressed are Japanese scholarly views of modern China and Chinese history, Chinese considerations of the Japanese language in the Ming and Qing periods, the Japanese immigration to the East Asian Mainland (especially to Shanghai and Harbin), and more.
Download or read book Travels with a Writing Brush written by and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich, exquisite and original anthology that illuminates Japanese travel writing over a thousand years 'Oh journey upon journey, my life is a brief moment, and I cannot hope that we will meet again' Roaming over mountains and along perilous shores, this anthology illuminates over a thousand years of Japanese travel writing. It takes in songs, diaries, tales and poetry, and ranges from famous works including The Pillow Book and the works of Basho to pieces such as the diary of a young girl who longs to return to the capital and her beloved books, or the writings of travelling monks who sleep on pillows of grass. Together they illuminate a long literary tradition, with intense poetic experience at its heart. Translated and edited with an introduction by Meredith McKinney
Download or read book The Cultural Dimensions of Sino Japanese Relations written by Joshua A. Fogel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-29 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the perceptions that the Chinese and the Japanese have of each other, and the information that helped to fuel those perceptions. There are two sections: China in Japan, debating the Asiatic Mode of Production and kyodotai; and Japan in China, covering the Manchurian Railway.
Download or read book Song in an Age of Discord written by H. Mack Horton and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a companion volume to the author's translation of Saiokuken Socho's The Journal of Socho (Stanford, 2002). The volume gives an overview of the author's life and times, explores the relationships between politicians, patronage, and the creative process, and reads the journal in terms of the standard norms of genres that Socho appropriated and reinterpreted.
Download or read book Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan written by Edward R. Drott and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long remarked on the frequency with which Japanese myths portrayed gods (kami) as old men or okina. Many of these “sacred elders” came to be featured in premodern theater, most prominently in Noh. In the closing decades of the twentieth-century, as the number of Japan’s senior citizens climbed steadily, the sacred elder of premodern myth became a subject of renewed interest and was seen by some as evidence that the elderly in Japan had once been accorded a level of respect unknown in recent times. In Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan, Edward Drott charts the shifting sets of meanings ascribed to old age in medieval Japan, tracing the processes by which the aged body was transformed into a symbol of otherworldly power and the cultural, political, and religious circumstances that inspired its reimagination. Drott examines how the aged body was used to conceptualize forms of difference and to convey religious meanings in a variety of texts: official chronicles, literary works, Buddhist legends and didactic tales. In early Japan, old age was most commonly seen as a mark of negative distinction, one that represented the ugliness, barrenness, and pollution against which the imperial court sought to define itself. From the late-Heian period, however, certain Buddhist authors seized upon the aged body as a symbolic medium though which to challenge traditional dichotomies between center and margin, high and low, and purity and defilement, crafting narratives that associated aged saints and avatars with the cults, lineages, sacred sites, or religious practices these authors sought to promote. Contributing to a burgeoning literature on religion and the body, Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan applies approaches developed in gender studies to “denaturalize” old age as a matter of representation, identity, and performance. By tracking the ideological uses of old age in premodern Japan, this work breaks new ground, revealing the role of religion in the construction of generational categories and the ways in which religious ideas and practices can serve not only to naturalize, but also challenge “common sense” about the body.
Download or read book Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages written by Houari Touati and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Middle Ages, Muslim travelers embarked on a rihla, or world tour, as surveyors, emissaries, and educators. On these journeys, voyagers not only interacted with foreign cultures—touring Greek civilization, exploring the Middle East and North Africa, and seeing parts of Europe—they also established both philosophical and geographic boundaries between the faithful and the heathen. These voyages thus gave the Islamic world, which at the time extended from the Maghreb to the Indus Valley, a coherent identity. Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages assesses both the religious and philosophical aspects of travel, as well as the economic and cultural conditions that made the rihla possible. Houari Touati tracks the compilers of the hadith who culled oral traditions linked to the prophet, the linguists and lexicologists who journeyed to the desert to learn Bedouin Arabic, the geographers who mapped the Muslim world, and the students who ventured to study with holy men and scholars. Travel, with its costs, discomforts, and dangers, emerges in this study as both a means of spiritual growth and a metaphor for progress. Touati’s book will interest a broad range of scholars in history, literature, and anthropology.
Download or read book Asian Crossings written by Steve Clark and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourteen chapters in this book examine various topics and contexts of travel writings on China, Japan and Southeast Asia. From the first Colombian on a trade mission to China, to French women travellers in Asia, and the opening of "Japan Fairs" in the US during the latter half of the nineteenth century, this book offers a kaleidoscopic glimpse of the various cultures in the eyes of their beholders coupled with insightful understanding of the various politics and relationships that are involved. While this book will appeal to expert scholars and students of travel literature and Asian studies, as well as those working on cultural studies, general readers will also find it an interesting and accessible addition to their collections.
Download or read book The Woman s Hand written by Paul Gordon Schalow and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume has a dual purpose. It aims to define the state of Japanese literary studies in the field of women's writing and to present cross-cultural interpretations of Japanese material of relevance to contemporary work in gender studies and comparative literature.
Download or read book Counting Dreams written by Roger K. Thomas and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counting Dreams tells the story of Nomura Bōtō, a Buddhist nun, writer, poet, and activist who joined the movement to oppose the Tokugawa Shogunate and restore imperial rule. Banished for her political activities, Bōtō was imprisoned on a remote island until her comrades rescued her in a dramatic jailbreak, spiriting her away under gunfire. Roger K. Thomas examines Bōtō's life, writing, and legacy, and provides annotated translations of two of her literary diaries, shedding light on life and society in Japan's tumultuous bakumatsu period and challenging preconceptions about women's roles in the era. Thomas interweaves analysis of Bōtō's poetry and diaries with the history of her life and activism, examining their interrelationship and revealing how she brought two worlds—the poetic and the political—together. Counting Dreams illustrates Bōtō's significant role in the loyalist movement, depicting the adventurous life of a complex woman in Japan on the cusp of the Meiji Restoration.
Download or read book Kamikaze Diaries written by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We tried to live with 120 percent intensity, rather than waiting for death. We read and read, trying to understand why we had to die in our early twenties. We felt the clock ticking away towards our death, every sound of the clock shortening our lives.” So wrote Irokawa Daikichi, one of the many kamikaze pilots, or tokkotai, who faced almost certain death in the futile military operations conducted by Japan at the end of World War II. This moving history presents diaries and correspondence left by members of the tokkotai and other Japanese student soldiers who perished during the war. Outside of Japan, these kamikaze pilots were considered unbridled fanatics and chauvinists who willingly sacrificed their lives for the emperor. But the writings explored here by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney clearly and eloquently speak otherwise. A significant number of the kamikaze were university students who were drafted and forced to volunteer for this desperate military operation. Such young men were the intellectual elite of modern Japan: steeped in the classics and major works of philosophy, they took Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” as their motto. And in their diaries and correspondence, as Ohnuki-Tierney shows, these student soldiers wrote long and often heartbreaking soliloquies in which they poured out their anguish and fear, expressed profound ambivalence toward the war, and articulated thoughtful opposition to their nation’s imperialism. A salutary correction to the many caricatures of the kamikaze, this poignant work will be essential to anyone interested in the history of Japan and World War II.
Download or read book Thinking Like a Man written by Bettina Gramlich-Oka and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2006-05-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, which deals with the life and ideas of the poet and philosopher Tadano Makuzu (1763-1825), presents insights into gender discourses of the late Tokugawa period (1600-1868), and thereby opens a way to break away from conventional intellectual history.
