Japanese

Emphasizing how modes of book production, promotion, and consumption shape ideas of literary value, Edward Mack examines the role of Japan's publishing industry in defining modern Japanese literature. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth,...

Women's bodies contributed to the expansion of the Japanese empire. With this bold opening, Noriko J. Horiguchi sets out in Women Adrift to show how women's actions and representations of women's bodies redrew the border and expanded, rather than...

By any measure, Japan's modern empire was formidable. The only major non-western colonial power in the 20th century, Japan controlled a vast area of Asia and numerous archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean. The massive extraction of resources and extensive...

Many intellectuals in eighteenth-century Japan valued classical poetry in either Chinese or Japanese for its expression of unadulterated human sentiments. They also saw such poetry as a distillation of the language and aesthetic values of ancient China...

This book examines the literature of Shiga Naoya, who is highly regarded in modern Japan for his unique style and methods of describing his personal experiences and emotions. Contributing new findings to the field of scholarship on Shiga, this study...

In the wake of its defeat in World War II, as Japan was forced to remake itself from "empire" to "nation" in the face of an uncertain global situation, literature and literary criticism emerged as highly contested sites. Today, this remarkable period...

In the wake of the disaster of 1945-as Japan was forced to remake itself from "empire" to "nation" in the face of an uncertain global situation-literature and literary criticism emerged as highly contested sites. Today, this...

Unlike traditional Japanese literature, which has a rich tradition of comedy, modern Japanese literature is commonly associated with high seriousness of purpose. In this study, Joel R. Cohn analyzes works by three writers - Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993),...

Offering the first systematic examination of five modern Japanese fictional narratives, all of them available in English translations, Atsuko Sakaki explores Natsume Soseki's Kokoro and Kusamakura (The Three-Cornered World); Ibuse Masuji's Kuroi ame...

Reflecting the Past is the first English-language study to address the role of historiography in medieval Japan, an age at the time widely believed to be one of irreversible decline. Drawing on a decade of research, including work with medieval...

Monstrous Bodies is a cultural and literary history of ambiguous bodies in imperial Japan. It focuses on what the book calls modern monsters-doppelgangers, robots, twins, hybrid creations-bodily metaphors that became ubiquitous in the literary landscape...

Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari) is traditionally identified as one of the most important Japanese literary texts of the Heian period (794--1185). Since its enshrinement in the classical literary canon as early as the eleventh century, the work has also...

This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902-1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated...

Since the 1950s, Abe Kobo (1924-1993) has achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of avant-garde literature. From his early forays into science fiction to his more mature psychological novels and films, and finally the...

Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Despite Murakami's critical and commercial success, particularly in the United States, his role as a mediator between Japanese and American literature...

The eleventh-century masterpiece The Tale of Genji casts a long shadow across the literary terrain of the Heian period (794-1185). It has dominated critical and popular reception of Heian literary production and become the definitive expression of the...

In the postwar years, an eruption of urbanization took place across Japan, from its historical central cities to the outer reaches of the archipelago. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese literary and visual media took a deep interest in cities and their...

Bringing together scholars from across the world, Haruo Shirane presents a fascinating portrait of The Tale of Genji's reception and reproduction over the past thousand years. The essays examine the canonization of the work from the late Heian through...

Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life into literary tradition. But how to understand...

In the wake of its defeat in World War II, as Japan was forced to remake itself from "empire" to "nation" in the face of an uncertain global situation, literature and literary criticism emerged as highly contested sites. Today, this...

Linking autobiographic writings by Korean women in Japan and the United States and the author's ethnographic insights, Writing Selves in Diaspora presents an original, profound, and powerful intervention_both literary and anthropological_in our...

Linking autobiographic writings by Korean women in Japan and the United States and the author's ethnographic insights, Writing Selves in Diaspora presents an original, profound, and powerful intervention-both literary and anthropological-in our...

Critics typically regard Abe Kobo (1924-93) as writing against realism, due to his avant-garde aesthetics that challenged the Naturalist realism dominating the literary mainstream and the Socialist realism of the orthodox Left in postwar Japan. He...

Struggling Upward reconsiders the rise and maturation of the modern novel in Japan by connecting the genre to new discourses on ambition and social mobility. Collectively called risshin shusse, these discourses accompanied the spread of industrial...

Until the late nineteenth century, Japan could boast of an elaborate cultural tradition surrounding the love and desire that men felt for other men. By the first years of the twentieth century, however, as heterosexuality became associated with an...

In Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, Satoru Saito sheds light on the deep structural and conceptual similarities between detective fiction and the novel in prewar Japan. Arguing that the interactions between the two genres were not...

By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan's military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other...

An eleventh-century classic, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon 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...

Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist,...

A fresh take on the doppleganger and its place in Japanese film and literature-past and present Since its earliest known use in German Romanticism in the late 1700s, the word Doppelganger (double-walker) can be found throughout a vast array of...

This book extensively analyzes the literary works of fiction that draw on the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011. This disaster inspired literally hundreds of fictional works in Japan from the time of the events...

In Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan’s engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600–1868). Large-scale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record—the first of their...

Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life into literary tradition. But how to understand...

Dancing the Dharma examines the theory and practice of allegory by exploring a select group of medieval Japanese noh plays and treatises. Susan Blakeley Klein demonstrates how medieval esoteric commentaries on the tenth-century poem-tale Ise monogatari...

In the seventeenth century, Japanese popular prose flourished as waves of newly literate readers gained access to the printed word. Commercial publishers released vast numbers of titles in response to readers’ hunger for books that promised them potent...

In the wake of the disaster of 1945-as Japan was forced to remake itself from "empire" to "nation" in the face of an uncertain global situation-literature and literary criticism emerged as highly contested sites. Today, this remarkable period holds rich...

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...

The "fourth-group Noh," so designated because they are performed fourth in a formal five-Noh program, includes almost one hundred plays, and is a group of great variety: some plays are supernatural or visional, others realistic; their leading...

Cool is a word of American English that has been integrated into the vocabulary of numerous languages around the globe. Today it is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles in our...

Thomas Rimer's book seeks to explain the background, structural principles, and development of pre-modem and modern Japanese fiction in a way that is comprehensive, methodical, and accessible to the general reader. Originally published in 1978. The...