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This Outcast Generation and Luminous Moss

Author: Taijun Takeda

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2013-01-08

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1462911358

The two novelettes by contemporary Japanese writer Taijun Takeda that are contained in this book were chosen for their overall excellence to be included in our current Library of Japanese Literature series. Both stories are relatively modern, one dealing with an incident of cannibalism in Hokkaido during World War II and the other about the Japanese who lived in Shanghai following the defeat. This Outcast Generation, according to the translators," is basically an existentialist novel and it reminds of Camus, but it is of course Japanese in essence." The story tells of the life of a man who as a member of a defeated nation living in a foreign country, feels no responsibility to anyone but himself--and this only in relation to food and water. Eventually, the hero is given the chance to initiate a change in his aimless life and he acts, for mankind or for love, in committing what is meant to be a Dostoyevskian axe-type murder. Translator Goldstein calls Luminous Moss "a real tour-de-force. I know nothing like it in any literature, though of course the problem of cannibalism has been treated by others."

This Outcast Generation. Luminous Moss

Author: Taijun Takeda

Publisher:

Published: 1967

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13:

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Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature

Author: Tomoko Aoyama

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2008-09-30

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0824864077

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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 relationships to food, nature, and culture, and to each other. The examples she offers are taken from novels (shosetsu) and other literary texts and include well known writers (such as Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Hayashi Fumiko, Okamoto Kanoko, Kaiko Takeshi, and Yoshimoto Banana) as well as those who are less widely known (Murai Gensai, Nagatsuka Takashi, Sumii Sue, and Numa Shozo). Food is everywhere in Japanese literature, and early chapters illustrate historical changes and variations in the treatment of food and eating. Examples are drawn from Meiji literary diaries, children’s stories, peasant and proletarian literature, and women’s writing before and after World War II. The author then turns to the theme of cannibalism in serious and popular novels. Key issues include ethical questions about survival, colonization, and cultural identity. The quest for gastronomic gratification is a dominant theme in "gourmet novels." Like cannibalism, the gastronomic journey as a literary theme is deeply implicated with cultural identity. The final chapter deals specifically with contemporary novels by women, some of which celebrate the inclusiveness of eating (and writing), while others grapple with the fear of eating. Such dread or disgust can be seen as a warning against what the complacent "gourmet boom" of the 1980s and 1990s concealed: the dangers of a market economy, environmental destruction, and continuing gender biases. Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature will tempt any reader with an interest in food, literature, and culture. Moreover, it provides appetizing hints for further savoring, digesting, and incorporating textual food.

Crisis in Identity

Author: Arthur G. Kimball

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1462912087

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This book is a critical study of ten postwar Japanese novels that focus on man's search for identity in the modern world. With the presentation of the Nobel Prize for Literature to a Japanese author in 1969, the international significance of modern Japanese literature was formally recognized by the Western world. The best indication of the West's present keen appreciation of modern Japanese literature is the large number of excellent translations that have appeared in recent years. In Crisis in Identity a common theme—modern man's search for identity—has been traced through ten major novels. This quest takes place n conjunction with wartime cannibalism, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, expatriation, senile eroticism, and personal and social alienation. The works in which these are depicted include: Diary of a Mad Old Man (Junichiro Tanizaki) House of the Sleeping Beauties (Yusunari Kawabata) Black Rain (Masuji Ibuse) Fires on the Plain (Shohei Ooka) THe Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Yukio Mishima) The Woman in the Dunes (Kobe Abe) A Personal Matter (Kenzaburo Oe) If you have not yet read these novels, Crisis in Identity will provide a stimulating introduction to them; if you have, it will reveal new insights.

Okinawan War Memory

Author: Kyle Ikeda

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 113501180X

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As one of Okinawa's most insightful writers and social critics, Medoruma Shun has highlighted the problems and limits of conventional representation of the Battle of Okinawa, raised new questions and concerns about the nature of Okinawan war memory, and expanded the possibilities of representing war through his groundbreaking and prize-winning fiction, editorials, essays, and speaking engagements. Yet, his writing has not been analyzed in regard to how his experience and identity as the child of two survivors of the Battle of Okinawa have powerfully shaped his understanding of the war and his literary craft. This book examines Okinawan war memory through the lens of Medoruma’s war fiction, and pays particular attention to the issues of second-generation war survivorship and transgenerational trauma. It explores how his texts contribute to knowledge about the war and its ongoing effects — on survivors, their offspring, and the larger community — in different ways from that of other modes of representation, such as survivor testimony, historical narrative, and realistic fiction. These dominant means of memory making have played a major role in shaping the various discourses about the war and the Battle of Okinawa, yet these forms of public memory and knowledge often exclude or avoid more personal, emotional, and traumatic experiences. Indeed, Ikeda’s analysis sheds light on the nature of trauma on survivors and their children who continue to inhabit sites of the traumatic past, and in turn makes an important contribution to studies on trauma and second-generation survivor experiences. This book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Asian literature, Japanese literature, Japanese history, war memory and Okinawa.

Tropics of Savagery

Author: Robert Thomas Tierney

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2010-05-20

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0520947665

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Tropics of Savagery is an incisive and provocative study of the figures and tropes of "savagery" in Japanese colonial culture. Through a rigorous analysis of literary works, ethnographic studies, and a variety of other discourses, Robert Thomas Tierney demonstrates how imperial Japan constructed its own identity in relation both to the West and to the people it colonized. By examining the representations of Taiwanese aborigines and indigenous Micronesians in the works of prominent writers, he shows that the trope of the savage underwent several metamorphoses over the course of Japan's colonial period--violent headhunter to be subjugated, ethnographic other to be studied, happy primitive to be exoticized, and hybrid colonial subject to be assimilated.

Japanese and Western Literature

Author: Armando Martins Janeira

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2016-08-09

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 1462912133

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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 the West. Contrastive studies are also made into such concepts as time, nature, love, and tragedy. This broad yet incisive survey of Japanese literarily genres and themes is more than a comparative study of literature, however; it is an attempt to grasp the core of Japanese culture by setting it against world culture. From this born a complex of new ideas and problems, and author is able to probe the extent of Western influence on Japanese fiction, poetry, and essays in the past hundred years.

Tokyo Redux

Author: David Peace

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2021-08-10

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1101947780

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A thrilling postmodern noir about the real-life disappearance, in 1949, of one of Japan's most powerful figures, and the three men who try--and fail--to crack the case. Tokyo, July 1949. The president of the National Railways of Japan vanishes. As American and Japanese investigators scrambled for answers, the case went cold--and it remains unsolved to this day. In Tokyo Redux, celebrated crime writer David Peace channels drama, research, and intrigue into this strikingly intelligent fictionalization of Japan's most enduring and haunting mystery. Spanning decades, Peace's novel reveals how the lives of three men all come to revolve around the same inexpicable disappearance. Starting in American-occupied Tokyo, where tension and confusion reign, American detective Harry Sweeney leads the missing-person investigation for General MacArthur's GHQ. Fifteen years later, as Tokyo prepares for the global spotlight as host of the summer Olympics, private investigator Murota Hideki--who was a policeman during the Occupation--is confronted by this very same case, and is forced to address something he's been hiding for more than a decade. And twenty-plus years after that, as Emperor Shōwa lays dying, Donald Reichenbach, an aging American eking out a living in Japan teaching and translating, discovers that the final reckoning of the greatest mystery of the era is now in his hands. The concluding installment of Peace’s acclaimed Tokyo Trilogy, Tokyo Redux is a page-turning portrait of post-World War II Tokyo and an inside look into a storied crime that continues to haunt multiple generations.

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature

Author: J. Thomas Rimer

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2011-11-15

Total Pages: 981

ISBN-13: 0231530277

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Featuring choice selections from the core anthologies The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868–1945, and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From 1945 to the Present, this collection offers a concise yet remarkably rich introduction to the fiction, poetry, drama, and essays of Japan's modern encounter with the West. Spanning a period of exceptional invention and transition, this volume is not only a critical companion to courses on Japanese literary and intellectual development but also an essential reference for scholarship on Japanese history, culture, and interactions with the East and West. The first half covers the three major styles of literary expression that informed Japanese writing and performance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: classical Japanese fiction and drama, Chinese poetry, and Western literary representation and cultural critique. Their juxtaposition brilliantly captures the social, intellectual, and political challenges shaping Japan during this period, particularly the rise of nationalism, the complex interaction between traditional and modern forces, and the encroachment of Western ideas and writing. The second half conveys the changes that have transformed Japan since the end of the Pacific War, such as the heady transition from poverty to prosperity, the friction between conflicting ideologies and political beliefs, and the growing influence of popular culture on the country's artistic and intellectual traditions. Featuring sensitive translations of works by Nagai Kafu, Natsume Soseki, Oe Kenzaburo, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, and many others, this anthology relates an essential portrait of Japan's dynamic modernization.