From the deathbed to the commuter railway station, from the marriage market to the fish market, from the baseball field to the grave, this volume explores the diversity of contemporary Japanese society by studying how people compose their families, their communities, and their own identities. Challenging fixed boundaries characteristic of institutional analysis, these essays comprise an anthropology of real people who age, who play, and whose lives speak to ours even over chasms of cultural differences and misunderstandings. The contributors are historians, sociologists, and anthropologists...