How can a post-national Japanese Studies be defined? How might the postwar myth of a monoethnic Japan be historicized? Can new forms of nationalism be effectively criticized by evoking a spirit of nationalist democracy? This book contains a series of groundbreaking essays by major Japanese and American scholars seeking to locate Japan beyond the geographical and ideological boundaries established post-1945 and under the Cold War. Included are essays on such iconic cultural figures as Maruyama Masao and Takamura Kotaro; on the impact of colonialism on prewar theories of race, language, and...

Yi Kwang-su (1892-1950) was one of the pioneers of modern Korean literature. When the serialization of Mujong (The Heartless) began in 1917, it was an immediate sensation, and it occupies a prominent place in the Korean literary canon. The Heartless is the story of a love triangle among three youths during the Japanese occupation. Yi Hyong-sik is a young man in his mid-twenties who is teaching English at a middle school in Seoul. Brilliant but also shy and indecisive, he is torn between two women. Kim Son-hyong is from a wealthy Christian family; she has just graduated from a modern,...

This collection of Chinese shadow plays contains seven selected traditional shadow plays from the Qing and early Republican periods from Shaanxi and Shanxi. A minor operatic genre, the Chinese shadow theatre provides one of the best avenues for examining the mentality and sense of humor of the silent masses. Although Shaanxi sports the largest number of shadow traditions in China and is where the art form is most vibrant, its shadow plays have never before been published in either Chinese or English. Translated from rare hand-copied play scripts, this volume includes the most literary and...

A coming-of-age novel set during the Korean War, by Pak Wan-Suh, one of Korea's leading contemporary writers. The award-winning author of more than twenty novels, and numerous short stories and essays, Park often deals with the themes of Korean War tragedies, middle-class values, and women's issues. The novel is rich with scenes of cultural clashes, racial prejudice, and the kinds of misunderstandings that many American soldiers and Koreans experienced during the war years.

How can capitalists' motivations during a Communist revolution be reliably documented and fully understood? Up to now, the answer to this question has generally eluded scholars who, for lack of nonofficial sources, have fallen back on Communist governments' official explanations. But the essays in this volume confirm that, at least in the case of the Communist revolution in China, it is finally possible to make new and fresh interpretations. By focusing closely on individuals and probing deeply into their thinking and experience, the authors of these essays have discovered a wide range of...

Gendered Landscapes presents ten short stories and novellas by representative modern Korean women writers dating from the 1930s to the end of the 1990s. Signature pieces selected from the acclaimed novelists' repertoire, these narratives address issues related to Korean women as gendered beings in a Confucian-governed patriarchal society. Thematically interlinked and compellingly articulated, they bring into full view the vivid and colorful mosaic of Korean women's lives over the past seven decades, engendered under the formidable sway of centuries-old Confucian gender ideologies and...

Despite their significance, the writings on Japanese music by Prussian medical scientist and physician Leopold Muller, published in Yokohama in a series from 1874 to 1876, have been nearly forgotten and marginalized even in historical research on the courtly gagaku traditions they focus upon. This study with full translation into both English and Japanese illuminates and reassesses Muller's pioneering contribution. It situates the essay-series historically in the light of an important line of thought about the evolution of ancient gagaku that arose only in the mid-twentieth century, as well...

Good Dogs explores the intersection of didacticism, Chinese vernacular scholarship, social criticism, and commercial storytelling in late Tokugawa Japan through an examination of a masterpiece of 19th century popular fiction: the novel Nanso Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi of Southern Kazusa; for short, Hakkenden), serialized from 1814 to 1842 by Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848). The author argues that in Bakin's hands, popular fiction functioned to mobilize and hybridize high culture and low, official and heterodox ideologies, and the demands of both the moralist and...

Presents ten short stories and novellas by representative modern Korean women writers dating from the 1930s to the end of the 1990s. Signature pieces selected from the acclaimed novelists' repertoire, these narratives address issues related to Korean women as gendered beings in a Confucian-governed patriarchal society.