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Fukushima Fiction introduces readers to the powerful literary works that have emerged out of Japan’s triple disaster, now known as 3/11. The book provides a broad and nuanced picture of the varied literary responses to this ongoing tragedy, focusing on “serious fiction” (junbungaku), the one area of Japanese cultural production that has consistently addressed the disaster and its aftermath. Examining short stories and novels by both new and established writers, author Rachel DiNitto effectively captures this literary tide and names it after the nuclear accident that turned a natural disaster into an environmental and political catastrophe. The book takes a spatial approach to a new lit...
Rashōmon: The story is set in a dilapidated Rashōmon gate in Kyoto during a time of social and economic decline. A nameless servant, recently dismissed by his master, takes refuge under the gate to escape a rainstorm. He is faced with a moral dilemma: should he uphold his principles and starve or abandon his ethics to survive? While under the gate, the servant encounters an old woman plucking hair from the corpses left there. She explains that she uses the hair to make wigs to sell and survive. The woman justifies her actions by claiming that the dead, in life, were also dishonest, so her deeds are no worse. Moved by desperation, the servant decides to abandon his morality. He attacks the old woman, robs her, and leaves her unconscious, resolving to do whatever it takes to survive.
"The notion of the individual was initially translated into Korean near the end of the nineteenth century and took root during the early years of Japanese colonial influence. Yoon Sun Yang argues that the first literary iterations of the Korean individual were prototypically female figures appearing in the early colonial domestic novel—a genre developed by reform-minded male writers—as schoolgirls, housewives, female ghosts, femmes fatales, and female same-sex partners. Such female figures have long been viewed as lacking in modernity because, unlike numerous male characters in Korean literature after the late 1910s, they did not assert their own modernity, or that of the nation, by expl...
"During the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries, several precursors of what is now commonly known as Shinto came together for the first time. By focusing on Mt. Miwa in present-day Nara Prefecture and examining the worship of indigenous deities (kami) that emerged in its proximity, this book serves as a case study of the key stages of “assemblage” through which this formative process took shape. Previously unknown rituals, texts, and icons featuring kami, all of which were invented in medieval Japan under the strong influence of esoteric Buddhism, are evaluated using evidence from local and translocal ritual and pilgrimage networks, changing land ownership patterns, and a range of relig...
Playing War: Field games. Paper battles -- Picturing war: The moral authority of innocence. Queering war -- Epilogue: the rule of babies in pink
Preliminary Material -- Sports Celebrity in Japan: A Transnational History -- Saving Sumo: Re-Presenting the National Sport -- The Making of a Self-Made Star: Celebrity Images and the Emergence of a Sports-Star Paradigm -- "So, Your Daughter Is a Sportsman": Gender Anxiety and Nationalism in the Golden Age of Sports -- "Japan's Number One" Goes to War: Baseball, Militarization, and Memory -- Becoming the Kanmuriwashi: Ethnicity, Narrativity, and "Spectacular Difference" -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Harvard East Asian Monographs.
This seminal book is the first sustained critical work that engages with the varieties of literature following the triple disasters—the earthquake, tsunami, and meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Huang Xiangjian, a mid-seventeenth-century member of the Suzhou local elite, journeyed on foot to southwest China and recorded its sublime scenery in site-specific paintings. Elizabeth Kindall’s innovative analysis of the visual experiences and social functions Huang conveyed through his oeuvre reveals an unrecognized tradition of site paintings, here labeled geo-narratives, that recount specific journeys and create meaning in the paintings. Kindall shows how Huang created these geo-narratives by drawing upon the Suzhou place-painting tradition, as well as the encoded experiences of southwestern sites discussed in historical gazetteers and personal travel records, and the geography of the ...
"Presenting fresh insights on the internal dynamics and global contexts that shaped foreign relations in early modern Japan, Robert I. Hellyer challenges the still largely accepted wisdom that the Tokugawa shogunate, guided by an ideology of seclusion, stifled intercourse with the outside world, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Examining diplomacy, coastal defense, and foreign trade, this study demonstrates that while the shogunate created the broader framework, foreign relations were actually implemented through cooperative but sometimes competitive relationships with the Satsuma and Tsushima domains, which themselves held largely independent ties with neighboring stat...