The first monograph published in English on Ihara Saikaku's fiction, David J. Gundry's lucid, compelling study examines the tension reflected in key works by Edo-period Japan's leading writer of 'floating world' literature between the official societal hierarchy dictated by the Tokugawa shogunate's hereditary status-group system and the era's de facto, fluid, wealth-based social hierarchy. The book's nuanced, theoretically engaged explorations of Saikaku's narratives' uses of irony and parody demonstrate how these often function to undermine their own narrator's intermittent moralizing....

Dancer, Nun, Ghost, Goddess explores the story of the dancers Giō and Hotoke, which first appeared in the fourteenth-century narrative Tale of the Heike. The story of the two love rivals is one of loss, female solidarity, and Buddhist salvation. Since its first appearance, it has inspired a stream of fiction, theatrical plays, and visual art works. These heroines have become the subjects of lavishly illustrated hand scrolls, ghosts on the noh stage, and Buddhist and Shinto goddesses. Physical monuments have been built to honor their memories; they are emblems of local pride and centerpieces...

Japan on the Silk Road provides for the first time the historical background indispensable for understanding Japan's current perspectives and policies in the vast area of Eurasia across the Middle East and Central Asia. Japanese diplomats, military officers, archaeologists, and linguists traversed the Silk Road, involving Japan in the Great Game and exploring ancient civilizations.The book exposes the entanglements of pre-war Japanese Pan-Asianism with Pan-Islamism, Turkic nationalism and Mongolian independence as a global history of imperialism. Japanese connections to Ottoman Turkey, India,...

In The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought, Dennitza Gabrakova discusses how the island imagery in the works by Imafuku Ryūta, Ukai Satoshi, Ōba Minako, Ariyoshi Sawako, Hino Keizō, Ikezawa Natsuki, Shimada Masahiko and Tawada Yōko shapes a critical understanding of Japan on multiple intersections of trauma and sovereignty. The book attempts an engagement with the vocabulary of postcolonial critique, while attending to the complexity of its translation into Japanese.

Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan, edited by Karen M. Gerhart, is a multidisciplinary examination of rituals featuring women, in which significant attention is paid to objects produced for and utilized in these rites as a lens through which larger cultural concerns, such as gender politics, the female body, and the materiality of the ritual objects, are explored. The ten chapters encounter women, rites, and ritual objects in many new and interactive ways and constitute a pioneering attempt to combine ritual and gendered analysis with the study of objects. Contributors...

Not Seeing Snow: Musō Soseki and Medieval Japanese Zen offers a detailed look at a crucial yet sorely neglected figure in medieval Japan. It clarifies Musō’s far-reaching significance as a Buddhist leader, waka poet, landscape designer, and political figure. In doing so, it sheds light on how elite Zen culture was formed through a complex interplay of politics, religious pedagogy and praxis, poetry, landscape design, and the concerns of institution building. The appendix contains the first complete English translation of Musō’s personal waka anthology, Shōgaku Kokushishū.

In Engaging the Other: “Japan and Its Alter-Egos”, 1550-1850 Ronald P. Toby examines new discourses of identity and difference in early modern Japan, a discourse catalyzed by the “Iberian irruption,” the appearance of Portuguese and other new, radical others in the sixteenth century. The encounter with peoples and countries unimagined in earlier discourse provoked an identity crisis, a paradigm shift from a view of the world as comprising only “three countries” (sangoku), i.e., Japan, China and India, to a world of “myriad countries” (bankoku) and peoples. In order to...

A History of Russo-Japanese Relations offers an in-depth analysis of the history of relations between Russia and Japan from the eighteenth century until the present day, with views and interpretations from Russian and Japanese perspectives that showcase the differences and the similarities in their joint history, including the territory problem as well as economic exchange.

For the monumental Poetry Competition in Six Hundred Rounds (Roppyakuban uta’awase), twelve poets each provided one hundred waka poems, fifty on seasonal topics and fifty on love, which were matched, critiqued by the participants and judged by Fujiwara no Shunzei, the premiere poet of his age. Its critical importance is heightened by the addition of a lengthy Appeal (chinjō) against Shunzei’s judgements by the conservative poet and monk, Kenshō. It is one of the key texts for understanding poetic and critical practice in late twelfth century Japan, and of the conflict between...

In Turbulent Streams: An Environmental History of Japan’s Rivers, 1600–1930, Roderick I. Wilson describes how the rivers of Japan are both hydrologically and historically dynamic. Today, these waterways are slowed, channeled, diverted, and dammed by a myriad of levees, multiton concrete tetrapods, and massive multipurpose dams. In part, this intensive engineering arises from the waterways falling great elevations over short distances, flowing over unstable rock and soil, and receiving large quantities of precipitation during monsoons and typhoons. But this modern river regime is also the...