Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Japanese

The publication in 1992 of Miyabe Miyuke's highly anticipated Kasha (translated into English as All She Was Worth) represents a watershed in the history of Japanese women's detective fiction. Inspired by Miyabe's success and the increasing number of Western mysteries in translation, women began writing mysteries of all types, employing the narrative and conceptual resources of the detective genre to depict and critique contemporary Japanese society--and the situation of women in it.

Bodies of Evidence examines this recent boom and the ways in which five contemporary authors (Miyabe,...

Ise monogatari is one of classical Japan's most important texts. It influenced other literary court romances like The Tale of Genji and inspired artists, playwrights, and poets throughout Japanese history and to the present day.

In a series of 125 loosely connected episodes, the Ise tells the story of a famous lover, Captain Ariwara no Narihira (825-880), and his romantic encounters with women throughout Japan. Each episode centers on an exchange of love poems designed to demonstrate wit, sensitivity, and courtliness.

Joshua Mostow and Royall Tyler present a fresh, contemporary...

This engaging study of the detective story's arrival in Japan--and of the broader cross-cultural borrowing that accompanied it--argues for a reassessment of existing models of literary influence between unequal cultures. Because the detective story had no pre-existing native equivalent in Japan, the genre's formulaic structure acted as a distinctive cultural marker, making plain the process of its incorporation into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japanese letters. Mark Silver tells the story of Japan's adoption of this new Western literary form at a time when the nation was...

Literature, like food, is, in Terry Eagleton's words, endlessly interpretable, and food, like literature, looks like an object but is actually a relationship. So how much do we, and should we, read into the way food is represented in literature? Reading Food explores this and other questions in an unusual and fascinating tour of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Tomoko Aoyama analyzes a wide range of diverse writings that focus on food, eating, and cooking and considers how factors such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and gender construction have affected people's...

A 29th-century dystopian society seen through the eyes of a mutant-cum-romantic poet; a post-impressionist landscape of orbs and cubes experienced by a wandering underdog; an imaginary sick room generated entirely from sounds reaching the ears of an invalid: These and other haunting re-presentations of time and space constitute the Japanese modernist landscape depicted in this volume of stories from the 1910s to the 1930s.

The fourteen stories selected for this anthology--by both relatively unknown and "must-read" authors--experiment with a protean modernist style in the vivacious...

Some aspects of the author's life and text seem curiously modern. She married at age thirty-three and identified herself as a reader and writer more than as a wife and mother. Enthralled by romantic fiction, she wrote extensively about the disillusioning blows that reality can deal to fantasy. The Sarashina Diary is a portrait of the...