Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Asian - Japanese

Joan Ericson's magnificent survey of writing by Japanese women significantly advances the current debate over the literary category of women's literature in modern Japan and demonstrates its significance in the life and work of twentieth-century Japan's most important woman writer, Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951).

Until the early 1980s, the literary category of women's literature (joryu bungaku) segregated most writing by modern Japanese women from the literary canon. Women's literature was viewed as a sentimental and impressionistic literary style that was popular but was critically...

This is the first full-length study in English of Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), one of modern Japan's most revered writers. It is a critical examination of a split that runs deep in the discursive space of Soseki's writings as order (narrative control and form) grapples with the forces of chaos (existential loneliness and unfathomable fear). Displaying a profound appreciation for the key attributes and complex cultural significance of Soseki's work, Angela Yiu argues that, although Soseki by nature and temperament desired control and order, his writing betrays a dark, romantic voice that...

The four stories and novella translated in this volume represent the best short fiction by Ishikawa Jun (1899-1987), one of the most important modernist writers to appear on the Japanese literary stage during the years before and after World War II. Throughout his career, Ishikawa resisted the tide of popular opinion to address issues of political and artistic significance and thereby paved the way for a generation of Japanese internationalists and experimentalists, including Abe Kobo and Oe Kenzaburo. Highly acclaimed and respected in Japan, Ishikawa remains little known in the West-in...

Hailed by the noted critic Karatani Kojin as a more important and lasting writer than Mishima, Shimao Toshio (1917-1986) remains almost unknown in the West. Several of his short stories have appeared in English translation, yet it is only now, with the publication of Philip Gabriel's comprehensive and searching study, that Shimao's work is being introduced to the worldwide audience it deserves. Mad Wives and Island Dreams not only is a thorough assessment of the literary legacy of a highly original and influential writer, but also represents a significant contribution to the consideration...

Are the works of contemporary Japanese novelists, as Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo has observed, mere reflections of the vast consumer culture of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large? Or do they contain their own critical components, albeit in altered form? Oe and Beyond surveys the accomplishments of Oe and other writers of the postwar generation while looking further to examine the literary parameters of the Post-Oe generation. Despite the unprecedented availability today of the work of many of these writers in excellent English translations, some twenty years have passed...

Southern Exposure is the first anthology of Okinawan literature to appear in English translation, and it appears at a propitious time. Although Okinawa Prefecture comprises only one percent of Japan's population, its writers have been winning a disproportionate number of literary awards in recent years--including the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for fiction, which was awarded to Matayoshi Eiki in 1996 and to Medoruma Shun in 1997. Both Matayoshi and Medoruma are represented in this anthology, which includes a wide range of fiction as well as a sampling of poetry from the 1920s to the...

How did a girl from the provinces, meant to do nothing more than run the family store, become a bold and daring poet whose life and work helped change the idea of love in modern Japan? Embracing the Firebird is the first book-length study in English of the early life and work of Yosano Akiko (1879-1942), the most famous post-classical woman poet of Japan. It follows Akiko, who was born into a merchant family in the port city of Sakai near Osaka, from earliest childhood to her twenties, charting the slow process of development before the seemingly sudden metamorphosis.

Akiko's later...

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...

Although still virtually unknown in the West, Ooka Shohei (1909-1988) is one of Japan's most important and influential writers and social critics. The Burdens of Survival is both a seminal English-language study of this preeminent literary figure and one of the first scholarly works to thoroughly examine the war literature of a major Japanese veteran-author. Drawing on Robert Jay Lifton's work on traumatic experience and survivor psychology, the book tells the illuminating story of Ooka's arduous journey that began with guilt-ridden survival as a prisoner of war in the Philippines and...

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,...

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,...

Using close readings of a range of premodern and modern texts, Atsuko Sakaki focuses on the ways in which Japanese writers and readers revised--or in many cases devised--rhetoric to convey Chineseness and how this practice contributed to shaping a national Japanese identity.

The volume begins by examining how Japanese travelers in China, and Chinese travelers in Japan, are portrayed in early literary works. An increasing awareness of the diversity of Chinese culture forms a premise for the next chapter, which looks at Japan's objectification of the Chinese and their works of art...