Emphasizing how modes of book production, promotion, and consumption shape ideas of literary value, Edward Mack examines the role of Japan’s publishing industry in defining modern Japanese literature. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, as cultural and economic power consolidated in Tokyo, the city’s literary and publishing elites came to dominate the dissemination and preservation of Japanese literature. As Mack explains, they conferred cultural value on particular works b...

The Affect of Difference is a collection of essays offering a new perspective on the history of race and racial ideologies in modern East Asia. Contributors approach this subject through the exploration of everyday culture from a range of academic disciplines, each working to show how race was made visible and present as a potential means of identification. By analyzing artifacts from diverse media including travelogues, records of speech, photographs, radio broadcasts, surgical t...

A whimsical tale written in rhyme of one little boy's courageous journey to rid his fear of the dark in his room each night and the goblins and ghosts he's sure inhabit it. Instead of spooky ghouls, he stumbles upon a portal to amazing places and endless experiences, a magical blackboard on which he can rough in and refine all his wildest dreams and hatch his juiciest schemes. If he changes his mind, simply erase.Combining lyrical storytelling and striking illustration...

A luminous translation of the classic Buddhist poem.Japan's capital city of Kyoto was devastated by earthquake, storm, and fire in the late 12th century. Retreating from "this unkind world," the poet and Buddhist priest Kamo-no-Chomei left the capital for the forested mountains, where he eventually constructed his famous "ten-foot-square" hut.From this solitary vantage point Chomei produced Hojoki, an extraordinary literary work that describes all ...

In the past hundred years, haiku has gone far beyond its Japanese origins to become a worldwide phenomenon—with the classic poetic form growing and evolving as it has adapted to the needs of the whole range of languages and cultures that have embraced it. This proliferation of the joy of haiku is cause for celebration—but it can also compel us to go back to the beginning: to look at haiku’s development during the centuries before it was known outside Japan. This in-depth study of haiku his...

These translated poems were written by two women of the Heian court of Japan between the ninth and eleventh centuries A.D.The poems speak intimately of their authors' sexual longing, fulfillment and disillusionment.

This history of Japanese philosophical traditions underscores the importance of Zen and Shinto to the development of Japanese culture.How do the Japanese talk about their native philosophy, Shinto, so many years after the Western Allies abolished it as a state religion? What is its relationship to Buddhism, and particularly to Zen? How modern can this very ancient creed ever be? These are some of the questions considered in this analytic work by Dr. Chikao Fujisawa,...

Winner of the Kobayashi Hideo Award, The Fall of Language in the Age of English lays bare the struggle to retain the brilliance of one's own language in this period of English-language dominance. Born in Tokyo but raised and educated in the United States, Minae Mizumura acknowledges the value of a universal language in the pursuit of knowledge yet also embraces the different ways of understanding offered by multiple tongues. She warns against losing this precious diversity.

Yöko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere is the first volume of criticism dedicated to the work of Yöko Tawada, one of the most highly acclaimed writers of her generation. Douglas Slaymaker has collected a range of essays including many that were featured at the 2006 MLA Conference, where a presidential panel featuring Yöko Tawada was organized by MLA President Marjorie Perloff, who has contributed a preface to this volume. The essays explore the plurality of voices and cultures in Taw...

Japanese and Western Literature delves deeply into Japanese culture to discover the concepts that similarize and differentiate Japanese and Western literary creations. Paralleling Japanese literary creations and fundamental thought with those of the West, the author draws many illuminating comparisons: for example, between the novels of Murasaki Shikibu and Marcel Proust, between the Portuguese poet Torga and the haiku master Issa, and between the picaresque novel in Japan and in ...

By any measure, Japan's modern empire was formidable. The only major non-western colonial power in the 20th century, Japan controlled a vast area of Asia and numerous archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean. The massive extraction of resources and extensive cultural assimilation policies radically impacted the lives of millions of Asians and Micronesians, and the political, economic, and cultural ramifications of this era are still felt today.The Japanese empire lasted from 1869-1945. Du...

Participating in the reframing of literary studies, Cosmopolitan Fictions identifies, as "cosmopolitan fiction", a genre of global literature that investigates the ethics and politics of complex and multiple belonging.The fictions studied by Katherine Stanton represent and revise the global histories of the past and present, including the "indigenous or native" narratives that are, in Homi Bhabha's words, "internal to" national identity itself.The works ta...