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In 1995, on the thirtieth anniversary of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s death, Adriana Boscaro organized an international conference in Venice that had an unusally lasting effect on the study of this major Japanese novelist. Thanks to Boscaro’s energetic commitment, Venice became a center for Tanizaki studies that produced two volumes of conference proceedings now considered foundational for all scholarly works on Tanizaki. In the years before and after the Venice Conference, Boscaro and her students published an abundance of works on Tanizaki and translations of his writings, contributing to his literary success in Italy and internationally. The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition honors Bo...
This volume collects contributions written by eight authors interested in different research areas in East Asian Studies. Divided into a Japanese and a Chinese section, it explores topics ranging from East Asian literatures to contact linguistics and sociology. The Japanese section contains four essays about contemporary Japanese cinema and different aspects of Japanese modern and contemporary literature (i.e. the literary motif of kame naku, ‘crying turtle’, yuri manga, and tenkō bungaku, the ‘literature of conversion’). The Chinese section concerns two main macro-topics: on the one hand, it focuses on issues related to cultural contacts between Italy and China; on the other hand, it deals with Chinese migration to Italy, highlighting socio-historical aspects and cultural production.
The Japanese theater scene is characterized by the vibrant coexistence of diverse forms of theater. Alongside well-known classical theater traditions, a stunningly modern scene exists, with an immeasurable number of small theaters. By focusing on the historical and contemporary contexts of how theater culture is enacted, this collection brings together essays on the spectrum of theater in Japan. Through literary and performance analyses and original case studies the collection explores complementary and interdisciplinary aspects of Japan’s performing arts. In an important and unique contribution, this volume includes essays by Japanese and Western scholars written in a mix of English and Japanese. Abstracts of each contribution translated into the opposite language allow readers without knowledge of both languages access to the main ideas of the essays.
This book argues that dramaturgy makes things visible and does so in two distinct and interrelating ways: creative processes and formal elements of performance are rendered visible and readable; and performance dramaturgy becomes an expanded practice in which performance is a locus for creating wide-ranging events and activities. This exploration defines dramaturgy as a perceptibly transforming agency in the construction, presentation and reception of contemporary performance; and it shows how contemporary performance has an intrinsic dramaturgical aspect whose proliferation of dramaturgical practices has led to a far-reaching reinvention of what contemporary theatre is. In doing so, this book deals with a careful selection of performance practices, including theatrical adaptations, new media dramaturgy, contemporary dance, installation-performance, postdramatic theatre, visionary works by auteurs, and revivals of well-known stage shows. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater studies, performance studies, cultural studies, curating, and dance scholarship.
Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) has long been recognized as one of the most important literary figures of prewar Japan. Her renown derives principally from the passion of her early poetry and from her contributions to 20th-century debates about women. This emphasis obscures a major part of her career, which was devoted to work on the Japanese classics and, in particular, the great Heian period text The Tale of Genji. Akiko herself felt that Genji was the bedrock upon which her entire literary career was built, and her bibliography shows a steadily increasing amount of time devoted to projects related to the tale. This study traces for the first time the full range of Akiko’s involvement with Th...
Jews in Japan: Presence and Perception. Antisemitism, Philosemitism and International Relations is a study on the history of real and imagined Jews in Japan, which discusses the little known cultural, political and economic ties between Jews and Japan, and follows the evolution of Jewish stereotypes in Japan in the last century and a half. The book begins with the arrival of Jews and their image in late 19th to early 20th-century Japan, when the seeds of later stereotyped visions were sown. The discussion then focuses on wartime Japan, delving into the complex and mixed attitudes of the Japanese Empire toward Jews. In postwar Japan, the partial reception of the Holocaust intertwined with ear...
Featuring choice selections from the core anthologies The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868–1945, and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From 1945 to the Present, this collection offers a concise yet remarkably rich introduction to the fiction, poetry, drama, and essays of Japan's modern encounter with the West. Spanning a period of exceptional invention and transition, this volume is not only a critical companion to courses on Japanese literary and intellectual development but also an essential reference for scholarship on Japanese history, culture, and interactions with the East and West. The first half covers the th...
An essential introduction to the life, writings, and legacy of one of Japan's most prolific Buddhist masters. The founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan, Eihei Dogen (1200–1253) is one of the most influential Buddhist teachers of all time. Although Dogen’s writings have reached wide prominence among contemporary Buddhists and philosophers, there is much that remains enigmatic about his life and writings. In Dogen: Japan’s Original Zen Teacher, respected Dogen scholar and translator Steven Heine offers a nuanced portrait of the master’s historical context, life, and work, paying special attention to issues such as: The nature of the “great doubt” that motivated Dogen’s relig...
Writers and intellectuals in modern Japan have long forged dialogues across the boundaries separating the spheres of literature and thought. This book explores some of their most intellectually and aesthetically provocative connections in the volatile transwar years of the 1920s to 1950s. Reading philosophical texts alongside literary writings, the study links the intellectual side of literature to the literary dimensions of thought in contexts ranging from middlebrow writing to avant-garde modernism, and from the wartime left to the postwar right. Chapters trace these dynamics through the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s collaboration with the nativist linguist Yamada Yoshio on a modern ...
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 (Tales of Ise) and the first imperial waka poetry anthology Kokin wakashū influenced the plots, characters, imagery, and rhetorical structure of seven plays (Maiguruma, Kuzu no hakama, Unrin’in, Oshio, Kakitsubata, Ominameshi, and Haku Rakuten) and two treatises (Zeami’s Rikugi and Zenchiku’s Meishukushū). In so doing, she shows that it was precisely the allegorical mode—vital to medieval Japanese culture as a whole—that enabled th...