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Humorous and poignant, Rough Living (Arakure) follows the fortunes of an ambitious young seamstress, Oshima, as she strives to survive and prosper in Meiji Japan. Written in 1915 by Tokuda Shusei (1872-1943), the great chronicler of Japan's working class, Rough Living explores the social transformations the country underwent in the early twentieth century from the perspective of a young woman who personifies the hungry, entrepreneurial spirit of the times. Through Oshima's eyes we see the formation of the structures of modern everyday life under capitalism as they evolved in Japan from the time of her birth in 1884 until the end of the novel, around 1910. An unwanted child, Oshima is adopted...
Shusei believed that literature should speak for the powerless and represent common experience - a belief forged by a number of oppositional political and literary movements, such as the movements for People's Rights in the 1870s, realism in the 1880s, naturalism in the first decade of the twentieth century, and social realism in the 1920s and 1930s. Torrance demonstrates that Shusei's concept of shomin (common) culture is the key to understanding his mature works.
In this stimulating study, Richard Torrance provides the first book-length English-language analysis of the life and works of the eminent Japanese writer Tokuda Shusei (1872-1943). Literary description and analysis, biography, and historical narrative are interwoven to produce not only a literary study of distinction but documentation of the social restructuring that began in the late Meiji period.
This provocative collection of essays is a comprehensive study of the "father-daughter dynamic" in Japanese female literary experience. Its contributors examine the ways in which women have been placed politically, ideologically, and symbolically as "daughters" in a culture that venerates "the father." They weigh the impact that this daughterly position has had on both the performance and production of women's writing from the classical period to the present. Conjoining the classical and the modern with a unified theme reveals an important continuum in female authorship-a historical approach often ignored by scholars. The essays devoted to the literature of the classical period discuss canonical texts in a new light, offering important feminist readings that challenge existing scholarship, while those dedicated to modern writers introduce readers to little-known texts with translations and readings that are engaging and original. Contributors: Tomoko Aoyama, Sonja Arntzen, Janice Brown, Rebecca L. Copeland, Midori McKeon, Eileen Mikals-Adachi, Joshua S. Mostow, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, Edith Sarra, Atsuko Sasaki, Ann Sherif.
This study examines the contradictory relationships between preservation, production, and redaction to shed light on the dark valley attributed to wartime culture and to cast a shadow on the supposedly bright, open space of free postwar discourse.
In Complicit Fictions, James Fujii challenges traditional approaches to the study of Japanese narratives and Japanese culture in general. He employs current Western literary-critical theory to reveal the social and political contest inherent in modern Japanese literature and also confronts recent breakthroughs in literary studies coming out of Japan. The result is a major work that explicitly questions the eurocentric dimensions of our conception of modernity. Modern Japanese literature has long been judged by Western and Japanese critics alike according to its ability to measure up to Western realist standards—standards that assume the centrality of an essential self, or subject. Conseque...
This first Western language study of one of Japan's most popular writers includes translations of key passages, critical commentary, and full translations of three essays by Hayashi Fumiko.
Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. In Ming dynasty China and early modern Italy, exchange was made through poetry, speech, and music; in pre-colonial India through magic, music, chemistry, and other arts. Yet like the art of courtesanry itself, those arts have often thrived outside present-day canons and modes of transmission, and have mostly vanished without trace.The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, while touching on its equivocal relationship to geisha. At once interdisciplinary, empirical, and theoretical, the book is the first...
Published with a new preface, this bestseller offers an intimate glimpse into a unique female community. Liz Dalby, the only non-Japanese woman ever to have trained as a geisha, reveals the realities of geisha life.