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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...
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.
This collection of Japanese women’s diary literature (nikki bungaku) begins with The Takemitsu Journal (also known as The Tale of the Tōnomine Lesser Captain, c. 962), an important precursor and model for the famous Kagerō Diary, and Tales of Toyokage (c. 971), a fictionalized reworking of his own poems by Regent Koremasa himself. It also includes the first complete English translations of the Hon’in no Jiju and of the narrative section of The Collected Poems of Lady Ise. The volume concludes with the Tales of Takamura (1185-1333), which Mostow describes as a site of struggle between masculine and feminine narrative styles.
Reveals the rich and lively world of literate women in Japan from 1600 through the early 20th century
The glamorous world of Kyoto's geisha is familiar to many readers but Sayo Masuda's tale tells a different story, one that bears little resemblance to the elegant geisha quarters frequented by illustrious patrons. Masuda was a geisha at a rural hot-spring
Michael Emmerich thoroughly revises the conventional narrative of the early modern and modern history of The Tale of Genji. Exploring iterations of the work from the 1830s to the 1950s, he demonstrates how translations and the global circulation of discourse they inspired turned The Tale of Genji into a widely read classic, reframing our understanding of its significance and influence and of the processes that have canonized the text. Emmerich begins with an analysis of the lavishly produced best seller Nise Murasaki inaka Genji (A Fraudulent Murasaki's Bumpkin Genji, 1829–1842), an adaptation of Genji written and designed by Ryutei Tanehiko, with pictures by the great print artist Utagawa...
This book is about the intertextual relationships between the works of the Shelleys and the Brownings. While a lot of research has been done on the relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Browning, virtually nothing has been said about the links between Mary Shelley and Robert Browning, and very little on the connections between the Shelleys and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Rieko Suzuki seeks to address this blind spot by focusing on three areas in particular: firstly, the way that Browning’s later poems reflect back on and re-engage with Shelley’s work; secondly, Mary Shelley’s influence on Browning’s early poems; and thirdly, Shelley’s presence in and influence on Eli...
These seven essays by the most recent English translator of The Tale of Genji emphasize three major interpretive issues. What is the place of the hero (Hikaru Genji) in the work? What story gives the narrative underlying continuity and form? And how does the closing section of the tale (especially the ten 'Uji chapters') relate to what precedes it? Written over a period of nine years, the essays suggest fresh, thought-provoking perspectives on Japan¿s greatest literary classic.
With the ever growing contact between Japan and the rest of the world comes an increasingly important need to understand a society that is fascinating but still often confusing to the outsider. In this brand new fourth edition of Understanding Japanese Society Joy Hendry brings the reader up to date both with recent changes as Japan hit the world headlines under the triple 2011 disasters, and with underlying continuities in ways of thinking that have matured over a long history of dealing with foreign influences and an unpredictable environment. This welcome new edition of Hendry’s bestselling introductory textbook provides a clear, accessible and readable introduction to Japanese society ...
Shinch?-K? ki<, the work translated here into English under the title “The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga,” is the most important source on the career of one of the best known figures in all of Japanese history—Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), the first of the “Three Heroes” who unified Japan after a century of fragmentation and internecine bloodshed. The other two of the triad, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), also make frequent appearances in this chronicle, playing prominent although clearly subordinate roles. So the chronicle also is an important source on their early careers, as it is on a constellation of other actors in Japan’s sixteenth-century drama. The chronicle’s author, ?ta Gy?ichi, was Nobunaga’s former retainer and an eyewitness of some of the events he describes. He completed his work about the year 1610.