• Translating the alien: Tsubouchi shōyō and Shakespeare
• Naturalizing the alien: Yosano Akiko's revolution in verse
• The demon within: Yosano Akiko and motherhood
• The gothic novel : Izumi Kyōka and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō
• Gothic stylistics: Arishima Takeo and melodramatic excess
• Female shamans: Ōshiro Tatsuhiro and yuta
• History/fiction/identity: Ōshiro Tatsuhiro and the uncannny
• The alien without: Murakami Haruki and the Sydney Olympics.

The Alien Within is the first book-length thematic study in English of the alien in modern Japanese literature and helps shed new light on a number of important authors. Leith Morton examines the Gothic, a form of writing with strong affinities to European Gothic and a motif in the fiction of several key modern Japanese writers, such as Arishima Takeo. Morton also discusses the translations of Tsubouchi Shoyo, Japan's most famous early translator of Shakespeare, and how this most alien and exotic author was absorbed into the Japanese literary and theatrical tradition. The new field of translation theory and how it relates to translating Shakespeare are also discussed. Morton devotes two chapters to the celebrated female poet Yosano Akiko, whose verse on childbirth and her unborn children broke taboos relating to the expression of the female body and sensibility. He also highlights the writing of contemporary Okinawan novelist Oshiro Tatsuhiro, whose work springs from what is for Japanese an exotic subtropical landscape and makes symbolic reference to the otherness at the heart of Japanese religiosity. Another significant but equally overlooked subject is the focus of the final chapter, which analyzes the travel writing of internationally best-selling author Murakami Haruki. Murakami's great corpus of work includes a one-volume study of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which Morton discusses in detail.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface-- Introduction--
• 1. Modernity and Shock--
• 2. Second Nature and Revolt--
• 3. Naturalized Modernity--
• 4. Strategies for the Good Life--
• 5. Kawabata Yasunari: Shock and the Reunion with Inner Nature--
• 6. Abe Kobo and the Triumph of Shock--
• 7. Murakami Haruki: Loneliness and Waiting--
• 8. Murakami Ryu: Boredom and the Nostalgia for Shock--
• 9. Nature and the Critique of Myth-- Bibliography-- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This study introduces the concepts of naturalization and naturalized modernity, and uses them as tools for understanding the way modernity has been experienced and portrayed in Japanese literature since the end of the Second World War. Special emphasis is given to four leading post-war writers - Kawabata Yasunari, Abe Kobo, Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryu. The author argues that notions of `shock' in modern city life in Japan (as exemplified in the writings of Walter Benjamin and George Simmel), while present in the work of older Japanese writers, do not appear to hold true in much contemporary Japanese literature: it is as if the `shock' impact of change has evolved as a `naturalized' or `Japanized' process. The author focuses on the implications of this phenomenon, both in the context of the theory of modernity and as an opportunity to reevaluate the works of his chosen writers.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• v. 1. The archaic and ancient ages
• v. 2. The early middle ages
• v. 3. The high middle ages.

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.

• Food in the diary
• Down-to-Earth eating and writing (1)
• Down-to-Earth eating and writing (2)
• Cannibalism in modern Japanese literature
• The gastronomic novels
• Food and gender in contemporary women's literature
• Confession of obsessive textual food eater.

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.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Preface
• A Century Of Reading Women'S Writing In Japan. An Introduction / Copeland, Rebecca L
• Chapter 1: The Feminine Critique: ''Womanliness'' And Thewomanwriter / Copeland, Rebecca L.
• Chapter 2: The Essentialwomanwriter / Bardsley, Jan
• Chapter 3: The Narcissisticwomanwriter / Aoyama, Tomoko / Hartley, Barbara
• Chapter 4: The Resistingwomanwriter / Ericson, Joan E.
• Chapter 5:Womenwriters And Alternative Critiques / Seaman, Amanda
• Chapter 6:Women Critiquing Men:Watching The Ripples On The Pond / Copeland, Rebecca L.
• Glossary Of Names And Terms
• Bibliography
• Recommended Further Reading
• About The Contributors
• Index.

Over the past thirty years translations of Japanese women's writing and biographies of women writers have enriched and expanded our understanding of modern Japanese literature. But how have women writers been received and read in Japan? To appreciate the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that the modern Japanese woman writer has faced, readers must consider the criticisms leveled against her, the expectations and admonitions that have been whispered in her ear, and pay attention to the way she herself has responded. What did it mean to be a woman writer in twentieth-century Japan? How was she defined and how did this definition limit her artistic sphere? "Woman Critiqued" builds on existing scholarship by offering English-language readers access to some of the more salient critiques that have been directed at women writers, on the one hand, and reactions to these by women writers, on the other. The grouping of the essays into chapters organized by theme clarifies how the discussion in Japan has been framed by certain assumptions and how women have repeatedly tried to intervene by playing with, undercutting, or attempting to exceed these assumptions. Chapter introductions contextualize the translated essays historically and draw out aspects that warrant particular scrutiny or explication. Although the translators do not cover all aspects or genres identified with women's literary endeavors in the twentieth-century, they provide a significant understanding of the evaluative systems under which Japanese women writers have worked. "Woman Critiqued" will be eagerly read by specialists in modern Japanese literature and those interested in comparative literature, women's studies, gender studies, and history.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• ch.
• 1. The frozen soul: sin and forgiveness in Miura Ayako's Freezing point
• ch.
• 2. The Seed must fall: two tales of self-sacrifice
• ch.
• 3. Aum, underground, and Murakami Haruki's Other side
• ch.
• 4. Literature of the soul: Ōe Kenzaburō's Somersault.

Spirit Matters is a ground-breaking work, the first to explore a broad range of writings on spirituality in contemporary Japanese literature. It draws on a variety of literary works, from enormously popular fiction (Miura Ayako's Hyôten and Shirokari Pass and the novels of Murakami Haruki) to more problematic "serious" fiction (Ôe Kenzaburô's Somersault) to nonfiction meditations on martyrdom and miracles (Sono Ayako's Kiseki) and the dynamics of religious cults (Murakami's interviews with members of Aum Shinrikyô in Underground). The first half of the volume focuses on the work of two women Christian writers, Miura Ayako and Sono Ayako. Combining a decidedly evangelistic bent with the formulas of the popular novel, Miura's 1964 novel Hyôten (Freezing Point) and its sequel are entertaining perennial bestsellers but also treat spiritual issues--like original sin--that are largely unexplored in modern Japanese literature. Sono's Kiseki (Miracles) and Miura's Shiokari Pass focus on the meaning of self-sacrifice and the miraculous and survey both the paths by which people come to faith and the spiritual doubts that assail them. Perhaps most striking for Western readers, Gabriel reveals how Miura's novel shows the lingering resistance to Christianity and its oppositional nature in Japan, and how in Kiseki Sono considers the kind of spiritual struggles many Japanese Christians experience as they try to reconcile their belief in a minority faith.

• pt. I. Writing the empire
• ch.
• 1. The genealogy of the South
• ch.
• 2. Taming the barbaric
• ch.
• 3. Writers in the South
• pt. II. Colonial desire and ambivalence: Nishikawa Mitsuru in Taiwan
• ch.
• 4. Nishikawa Mitsuru and Bungei Taiwan
• ch.
• 5. Gender, historiography and romantic colonialism
• pt. III. The empire writes back
• ch.
• 6. language policy and cultural identity
• ch.
• 7. The nativist response
• ch.
• 8. Imperial subject literature and its discontents.

Under an Imperial Sun examines literary, linguistic, and cultural representations of Japan's colonial South (nanpo). Building on the most recent scholarship from Japan, Taiwan, and the West, it takes a cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, comparative approach that considers the views of both colonizer and colonized as expressed in travel accounts and popular writing as well as scholarly treatments of the area's cultures and customs. Readers are introduced to the work of Japanese writers Hayashi Fumiko and Nakajima Atsushi, who spent time in the colonial South, and expatriate Nishikawa Mitsuru, who was raised and educated in Taiwan and tried to capture the essence of Taiwanese culture in his fictional and ethnographic writing. The effects of colonial language policy on the multilingual environment of Taiwan are discussed, as well as the role of language as a tool of imperialism and as a vehicle through which Japan's southern subjects expressed their identity - one that bridged Taiwanese and Japanese views of self. Struggling with these often conflicting views, Taiwanese authors, including the Nativists Yang Kui and Lu Heruo and Imperial Subject writers Zhou Jinpo and Chen Huoquan, expressed personal and societal differences in their writing. This volume looks closely at their lives and works and considers the reception of this literature - the Japanese language literature of Japan's colonies - both in Japan and in the former colonies. Finally, it asks: What do these works tell us about the specific example of cultural hybridity that arose in Japanese-occupied Taiwan and what relevance does this have to the global phenomenon of cultural hybridity viewed through a postcolonial lens?
(source: Nielsen Book Data)