This is the first of a three-volume anthology of Edo- and Meiji-era urban literature that includes An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-City, 1750–1850 and A Tokyo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Modern Metropolis, 1850–1920. The present work focuses on the years in which bourgeois culture first emerged in Japan, telling the story of the rising commoner arts of Kamigata, or the “Upper Regions” of Kyoto and Osaka, which harkened back to Japan’s middle ages eve...

The city of Tokyo, renamed after the Meiji Restoration, developed an urban culture that was a dynamic integration of Edo’s highly developed traditions and Meiji renovations, some of which reflected the influence of Western culture. This wide-ranging anthology—including fictional and dramatic works, essays, newspaper articles, political manifestos, and cartoons—tells the story of how the city’s literature and arts grew out of an often chaotic and sometimes paradoxical political environment ...

Harp of Burma is Japan's classic novel of pathos and compassion in the midst of senseless warfare.Winner of the prestigious Mainichi Shuppan Bunkasho prize and the basis for the critically acclaimed film The Burmese Harp by Ichikawa Kon, Harp of Burma shares a powerful human story about Japanese soldiers on the front lines in WWII. Losing a desperate battle against British forces in the tropical jungles of Burma, the young soldiers discov...

"Clear-eyed glimpses of human behavior in the extremities of poverty, stupidity, greed, vanity… Story-telling of an unconventional sort, with most of the substance beneath the shining, enameled surface." —The New York Times Book ReviewWidely acknowledged as "the father of the Japanese short story," Ryunosuke Akutagawa remains one of the most influential Japanese writers of all time. Rashomon and Other Stories, a collection of his most celebrated w...