The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa

The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa PDF Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520241827
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
A new translation of the only work not currently available in English by a Nobel-Prize winning author and the best known Japanese writer outside of Japan.

The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa

The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa PDF Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520241827
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
A new translation of the only work not currently available in English by a Nobel-Prize winning author and the best known Japanese writer outside of Japan.

Topographies of Japanese Modernism

Topographies of Japanese Modernism PDF Author: Seiji M. Lippit
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231125314
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Lippit offers the first book-length study in English of Japanese modernist fiction from the 1920s to the 1930s. Through close readings of four leading figures of this movement--Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, Kawabata, and Hayashi--Lippit aims to establish a theoretical and historical framework for the analysis of Japanese modernism.

Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature

Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: Rachael Hutchinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317647726
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature provides a comprehensive overview of how we study Japanese literature today. Rather than taking a purely chronological approach to the content, the chapters survey the state of the field through a number of pressing issues and themes, examining the ways in which it is possible to read modern Japanese literature and situate it in relation to critical theory. The Handbook examines various modes of literary production (such as fiction, poetry, and critical essays) as distinct forms of expression that nonetheless are closely interrelated. Attention is drawn to the idea of the bunjin as a ‘person of letters’ and a more realistic assessment is provided of how writers have engaged with ideas – not labelled a ‘novelist’ or ‘poet’, but a ‘writer’ who may at one time or another choose to write in various forms. The book provides an overview of major authors and genres by situating them within broader themes that have defined the way writers have produced literature in modern Japan, as well as how those works have been read and understood by different readers in different time periods. The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature draws from an international array of established experts in the field as well as promising young researchers. It represents a wide variety of critical approaches, giving the study a broad range of perspectives. This handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian Studies, Literature, Sociology, Critical Theory, and History.

Dandelions

Dandelions PDF Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811224104
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
A fascinating discovery, Kawabata’s unfinished final novel Dandelions is a great master’s last word A fascinating discovery, Dandelions is Kawabata's final novel, left incomplete when he committed suicide in 1972. Beautifully spare and deeply strange, Dandelions explores love and madness and consists almost entirely conversations between a woman identified only as Ineko's mother, and Kuno, a young man who loves Ineko and wants to marry her. The two have left Ineko at the Ikuta Clinic, a mental hospital, which she has entered for treatment of somagnosia, a condition that might be called “seizures of body blindness.” Although her vision as a whole is unaffected, she periodically becomes unable to see her lover Kuno. Whether this condition actually constitutes madness is a topic of heated discussion between Kuno and Ineko’s mother: Kuno believes Ineko's blindness is actually an expression of her love for him, as it is only he, the beloved, she cannot see. In this tantalizing book, Kawabata explores the incommunicability of desire and carries the art of the novel, where he always suggested more than he stated, into mysterious and strange new realms. Dandelions is the final word of a truly great master, the first Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize.

Topographies of Japanese Modernism

Topographies of Japanese Modernism PDF Author: Seiji M. Lippit
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231500688
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
What happens when a critique of modernity—a "revolt against the traditions of the Western world"—is situated within a non-European context, where the concept of the modern has been inevitably tied to the image of the West? Seiji M. Lippit offers the first comprehensive study in English of Japanese modernist fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Through close readings of four leading figures of this movement— Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, Kawabata, and Hayashi—Lippit aims to establish a theoretical and historical framework for the analysis of Japanese modernism. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a general sense of crisis surrounding the institution of literature, marked by both the radical politicization of literary practice and the explosion of new forms of cultural production represented by mass culture. Against this backdrop, this study traces the heterogeneous literary topographies of modernist writings. Through an engagement with questions of representation, subjectivity, and ideology, it situates the disintegration of literary form in these texts within the writers' exploration of the fluid borderlines of Japanese modernity.

Disruptions of Daily Life

Disruptions of Daily Life PDF Author: Arthur M. Mitchell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501752928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Disruptions of Daily Life explores the mass media landscape of early twentieth century in order to uncover the subversive societal impact of four major Japanese authors: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. Arthur Mitchell examines this literature against global realities through a modernist lens, studying an alternative modernism that challenges the Western European model. Through broad surveys of discussions surrounding Japanese life in the 1920s, Mitchell locates and examines flourishing divergent ideologies of the early twentieth century such as gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. He unravels how the narrative and linguistic strategies of modernist texts interrogated the innocence of this language, disrupting their hold on people's imagined relationship to daily life. These modernist works often discursively displaced the authority of their own claims by inadvertently exposing the global epistemology of East vs. West. Mitchell's reading of these formalist texts expands modernism studies into a more translational dialogue by locating subversions within the local historical culture and allowing readers to make connections to the time and place in which the texts were written. In highlighting the unbreakable link between literature and society, Disruptions of Daily Life reaffirms the value of modernist fiction and its ability to make us aware of how realities are constructed—and how those realities can be changed.

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense

Erotic Grotesque Nonsense PDF Author: Miriam Silverberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520222733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
"A sumptuously documented book, one that makes innovative use of the principle of montage to generate informative historical readings of Japan's myriad mass cultural phenomena in the early twentieth century. Both in terms of its scholarship and its methodology, this is a truly admirable work."—Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Brown University "As Miriam Silverberg has brilliantly shown here, the modern times of 1920s and ‘30s Japan were rendered in a cacophony of cultural mixing: a period of consumerist desires and Hollywood fantasy-making but also the rise of nationalist empire-building. Excavating its kaleidoscope of everyday culture Silverberg astutely offers a theory of montage for how Japanese subjects 'code-switched' in juggling the mixed cultural/political elements of these times. Utilizing a montage of media, texts, sites, and scholarship, Silverberg leads the reader into the terrain of the 'erotic grotesque nonsense' in a work that is as scintillating as it is theoretically important."—Anne Allison, author of Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination "Unlike other scholars who merely view ero-guro-nansensu in its literal meanings, Silverberg brilliantly documents it as a complex cultural aesthetic expressed in a spectrum of fascinating mass culture forms and preoccupations. With great erudition and humor, she traces the sensory and conceptual modes that are animated with potency and sophistication through this cultural metaphor. This book is destined to be a classic in Japan scholarship."—Laura Miller, author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture PDF Author: Jennifer Coates
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351716786
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
This Companion is a comprehensive examination of the varied ways in which gender issues manifest throughout culture in Japan, using a range of international perspectives to examine private and public constructions of identity, as well as gender- and sexuality-inflected cultural production. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture features both new work and updated accounts of classic scholarship, providing a go-to reference work for contemporary scholarship on gender in Japanese culture. The volume is interdisciplinary in scope, with chapters drawing from a range of perspectives, fields, and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, history, law, linguistics, literature, media and cultural studies, politics, and sociology. This reflects the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the dual focal points of this volume—gender and culture—and the ways in which these themes infuse a range of disciplines and subfields. In this volume, Jennifer Coates, Lucy Fraser, and Mark Pendleton have brought together an essential guide to experiences of gender in Japanese culture today—perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in Japan, culture, gender studies, and beyond.

Dictionary of Oriental Literatures 1

Dictionary of Oriental Literatures 1 PDF Author: Jaroslav Prusek
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000158179
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The Dictionary of Oriental Literatures fills a long-felt gap in Western literature by presenting a concise summary, in three volumes and about 2000 articles, of practically all the literatures of Asia and North Africa. The first volume describes the Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian literatures; the second covers the area of South and South-East Asia, comprising, besides all literatures of India and Pakistan, those of Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines; and the third is devoted to the numerous literatures of West Asia and North Africa. including on the one hand the literatures of the ancient Near East and Egypt, and on the other hand those of Central Asia and the Caucasus, of Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and of the various Arab countries including Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. The majority of entries give information about the life and work of the individual writers and poets of the classical, medieval and modern periods of the literatures included and also attempt to evaluate their writings from the historical and aesthetic point of view. The remaining articles describe literary terms, genres, forms, schools, movements etc. The Dictionary has been prepared by the Oriental Institute in Prague under the supervision of a Advisory Editorial Board of European and American scholars of international reputation and is unique in that it is the fruit of the collaboration of over 150 orientalists from many parts of the world. Contents include: Volume I East Asia: The Far East, including Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian literatures. Volume II South and South-East Asia: Ancient Indian, Assamese, Baluchi, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Indian literature in English, Indo-Persian, Kannada, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, Pashto, Rajasthani, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, Sinhalese, Nepali, Burmese, Thai, Cambodian, Malay and Indonesian, Javanese, Vietnamese and Philippines literatures. Volume III West Asia and North Africa: The Near East and Egypt, Central Asia and the Caucasus, Turkish, Persian, Afghan, Kurd and Arabic literatures, covering all the Arab states from Iraq in the East to Algeria in the West.

Modanizumu

Modanizumu PDF Author: William J. Tyler
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824832426
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
Remarkably little has been written on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Until now there has been neither a comprehensive survey of Japanese modernist fiction nor an anthology of translations to provide a systematic introduction. Only recently have the terms "modernism" and "modernist" become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-a-vis Western European modernism remain. This anomaly is especially ironic in view of the decidedly modan prose crafted by such well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro­. By contrast, scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced modanizumu as a key concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s. This volume addresses this discrepancy by presenting in translation for the first time a collection of twenty-five stories and novellas representative of Japanese authors who worked in the modernist idiom from 1913 to 1938. Its prefatory materials provide a systematic overview of the literary movement’s salient features—anti-naturalism, cosmopolitanism, the concept of the double self, and actionism—and describe how modanizumu evolved from its early "jagged edges" into a sophisticated yet popular expression of Japanese urban life in the first half of the twentieth century. The modanist style, characterized by youthful exuberance, a tongue-in-cheek tone, and narrative techniques like superimposition, is amply illustrated. Modanizumu introduces faces altogether new or relatively unknown: Abe Tomoji, Kajii Motojiro, Murayama Kaita, Osaki Midori, Tachibana Sotoo, Takeda Rintaro, Tani Joji, Yoshiyuki Eisuke, and Yumeno Kyusaku. It also revisits such luminaries as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and the detective novelist Edogawa Ranpo. Key works that it culls from the modernist repertoire include Funahashi Seiichi’s Diving, Hagiwara Sakutaro’s "Town of Cats," Ito Sei’s Streets of Fiendish Ghosts, and Kawabata’s film scenario Page of Madness. This volume moves beyond conventional views to place this important movement in Japanese fiction within a global context: an indigenous expression born of the fission of local creativity and the fusion of cross-cultural interaction.