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Beginning with the first writings to assimilate and rework Western literary traditions, through the flourishing of the short story genre in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Taisho era, to the new breed of writers produced under the constraints of literary censorship, and the current writings reflecting the pitfalls and paradoxes of modern life, this anthology offers a stimulating survey of the entire development of the Japanese short story.
'The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories' includes many specially commissioned translations, and is the only anthology to span the whole of Japan's modern era. Featured authors include Tanizaki, Mishima, Murakami, Oe, and Kawabata. Notes on all contributors and a filmography are included.
"The writer Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992) rose to fame in the mid-1970s for his vivid stories about a clan scarred by violence and poverty on the underside of the Japanese economic miracle. Drawing upon the lives, experiences, and languages of the burakumin, the outcaste communities long discriminated against in Japanese society as a defiled underclass, Nakagami’s works of fiction and nonfiction record with vitality and violence the realities—actual and imagined—of buraku culture. In this critical study of Nakagami’s life and oeuvre, Eve Zimmerman delves into the writer’s literary world, exploring the genres, forms, and themes with which Nakagami worked and experimented. These chapter...
Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive develop...
Many Japanese once revered the wolf as Oguchi no Magami, or Large-Mouthed Pure God, but as Japan began its modern transformation wolves lost their otherworldly status and became noxious animals that needed to be killed. By 1905 they had disappeared from the country. In this spirited and absorbing narrative, Brett Walker takes a deep look at the scientific, cultural, and environmental dimensions of wolf extinction in Japan and tracks changing attitudes toward nature through Japan's long history. Grain farmers once worshiped wolves at shrines and left food offerings near their dens, beseeching the elusive canine to protect their crops from the sharp hooves and voracious appetites of wild boars...
Train Travel as Embodied Space-Time in Narrative Theory argues that the train is a loaded trope for reconfiguring narrative theories past their “spatial turn.” Atsuko Sakaki’s method exploits intensive and rigorous close reading of literary and cinematic narratives on one hand, and on the other hand interdisciplinary perspectives that draw out larger connections to narrative theory. The book utilizes not only narratological frameworks but also concepts of space-focused humanity oriented social sciences, such as human geography, mobility studies, tourism studies, and qualitative/experience-based ethnography, in their post “narrative turn.” On this interface of narrative studies and spatial studies, this book pays concerted attention to the formation of affordances, or relations in which the human subject uses a space-time and things in it, in terms of passenger experience of the train carriage and its extension. Affiliation: Atsuko Sakaki, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
An overview of writing about the war from a global perspective, aimed at students of modern literature.
This book explores one of the crucial themes in postwar Japanese fiction. Through an examination of the work of a number of prominent twentieth century Japanese writers, the book analyses the meaning of the body in postwar Japanese discourse, the gender constructions of the imagery of the body and the implications for our understanding of individual and national identity. This book will be of interest to all students of modern Japanese literature.
Due to their symbolic and iconographic meanings, expressions of ‘collective memory’ constitute the mental topography of a society and make a powerful contribution to its cultural, political and social identity. In Japan, the subject of ‘memory’ has prompted a huge response in recent years. Indeed, it has been and continues to be debated at many levels of Japan’s political, social, economic and cultural life. For the historian and social scientist the opportunity to access recorded memories is invariably welcomed as a valuable building block in research and a determinant in establishing balance and perspective. This volume brings together a selection of the most significant research on memory relating to modern Japan. Thematically structured (Politics and International Relations; Memorials, Museums, National Heroes; Popular and Intellectual Representations of Memory; Realms of Memory: Centre and Periphery) the subjects treated include the Nanjing massacre, comfort women, the fate of war monuments, the political use of national memory in post-war Japan and remembering the atomic bomb.
Human Rights and the Arts: Perspectives on Global Asia approaches human rights issues from the perspective of artists and writers in global Asia. By focusing on the interventions of writers, artists, filmmakers, and dramatists, the book moves toward a new understanding of human rights that shifts the discussion of contexts and subjects away from the binaries of cultural relativism and political sovereignty. From Ai Wei Wei and Michael Ondaatje, to Umar Kayam, Saryang Kim, Lia Zixin, and Noor Zaheer, among others, this volume takes its lead from global Asian artists, powerfully re-orienting thinking about human rights subjects and contexts to include the physical, spiritual, social, ecological, cultural, and the transnational. Looking at a range of work from Tibet, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Bangladesh, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Macau as well as Asian diasporic communities, this book puts forward an understanding of global Asia that underscores “Asia” as a global site. It also highlights the continuing importance of nation-states and specific geographical entities, while stressing the ways that the human rights subject breaks out of these boundaries.