<p><div>First published in Japan in 1983, this book is now a classic in modern Japanese literary studies. Covering an astonishing range of texts from the Meiji period (1868-1912), it presents sophisticated analyses of the ways that experiments in literary language produced multiple new--and sometimes revolutionary--forms of sensibility and subjectivity. Along the way, Kamei Hideo carries on an extended debate with Western theorists such as Saussure, Bakhtin, and Lotman, as well as with such contemporary Japanese critics as Karatani Kojin and Noguchi Takehiko.</div> <div><i>Transformations of Sensibility</i> deliberately challenges conventional wisdom about the rise of modern literature in Japan and offers highly original close readings of works by such writers as Futabatei Shimei, Tsubouchi Shoyo, Higuchi Ichiyo, and Izumi Kyoka, as well as writers previously ignored by most scholars. It also provides a new critical theorization of the relationship between language and sensibility, one that links the specificity of Meiji literature to broader concerns that transcend the field of Japanese literary studies. Available in English translation for the first time, it includes a new preface by the author and an introduction by the translation editor that explain the theoretical and historical contexts in which the work first appeared.</div></p>

Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Literature & Fiction

Kamei, Hideo

History & Criticism

U of M Center For Japanese Studies

<p><div> <div><i>Sh&#333;tetsu monogatari</i> was written by a disciple of Sh&#333;tetsu (1381-1459), whom many scholars regard as the last great poet of the courtly tradition. The work provides information about the practice of poetry during the 14th and 15th centuries, including anecdotes about famous poets, advice on how to treat certain standard topics, and lessons in etiquette when attending or participating in poetry contests and gatherings. But unlike the many other works of that time that stop at that level, Sh&#333;tetsu's contributions to medieval aesthetics gained prominence, showing him as a worthy heir--both as poet and thinker--to the legacy of the great poet-critic Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241).</div> <div>The last project of the late Robert H. Brower, <i>Conversations with Shôtetsu</i> provides a translation of the complete <i>Nihon koten bungaku taikei</i> text, as edited by Hisamatsu Sen'ichi. Steven D. Carter has annotated the translation and provided an introduction that details Shôtetsu's life, his place in the poetic circles of his day, and the relationship of his work to the larger poetic tradition of medieval Japan.</div> <div><i>Conversations with Sh&#333;tetsu</i> is important reading for anyone interested in medieval Japanese literature and culture, in poetry, and in aesthetics. It provides a unique look at the literary world of late medieval Japan.</div> </div></p>

Conversations with Shotetsu (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Politics & Social Sciences

Carter, Steven

Brower, Robert

Social Sciences

<p><div>Kurihara Sadako was born in Hiroshima in 1913, and she was there on August 6, 1945. Already a poet before she experienced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, she used her poetic talents to describe the blast and its aftermath. In 1946, despite the censorship of the American Occupation, she published <i>Kuroi tamago</i> (Black Eggs), poems from before, during, and immediately after the war. This volume includes a translation of <i>Kuroi tamago from</i> the complete edition of 1983.</div> <div>But August 6, 1945, was not the end point of Kurihara's journey. In the years after <i>Kuroi tamago</i> she has broadened her focus--to Japan as a victimizer rather than victim, to the threat of nuclear war, to antiwar movements around the world, and to inhumanity in its many guises. She treats events in Japan such as politics in Hiroshima, Tokyo's long-term complicity in American policies, and the decision in 1992 to send Japanese troops on U.N. peacekeeping operations. But she also deals with the Vietnam War, Three Mile Island, Kwangju, Greenham Common, and Tiananmen Square. This volume includes a large selection of these later poems.</div> <div>Kurihara sets us all at ground zero, strips us down to our basic humanity, and shows us the world both as it is and as it could be. Her poems are by turns sorrowful and sarcastic, tender and tough. Several of them are famous in Japan today, but even there, few people appreciate the full force and range of her poetry. And few poets in any country--indeed, few artists of any kind--have displayed comparable dedication, consistency, and insight.</div></p>

Black Eggs: Poems by Kurihara Sadako (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Kurihara, Sadako

Poetry

<p><div>This is the first monograph-length study in English of Kamo no Chomei, one of the most important literary figures of medieval Japan. Drawing upon a wide range of writings in a variety of genres from the Heian and Kamakura periods, Pandey focuses on the terms <i>kyogen kigo</i> (wild words and fancy phrases), <i>shoji soku nehan</i> (samsara is nirvana), <i>hoben</i> (expedient means), and <i>suki</i> (single-minded devotion to an art). She shows how these terms deployed by writers in an attempt to reconcile literary and artistic activities with a commitment to Buddhism. By locating Chomei within this broad context, the book offers an original reading of his texts, while at the same time casting a light upon intellectual preoccupations that were central to the times.</div> <div><i>Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan</i> is an important contribution to a growing body of work that challenges the rigid distinction between the religious and literary--a distinction that would have made little sense to medieval writers, many of whom were poets as well as priests--and sheds light on the particular ways in which a religio-aesthetic tradition came to be articulated in medieval Japan. Through an examination of records left by Chomei's contemporaries, the book also traces the life of Chomei, particularly his activities as a court poet and the circumstances that led to his taking the tonsure.</div></p>

Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan: The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chomei (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Pandey, Rajyashree

Essays on the Modern Japanese Church: Christianity in Meiji Japan (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

History

Yamaji, Aizan

Asia

Musashino in Tuscany: Japanese Overseas Travel Literature, 1860–1912 (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Fessler, Susanna

<p>Senshi was born in 964 and died in 1035, in the Heian period of Japanese history (794–1185). Most of the poems discussed here are what may loosely be called Buddhist poems, since they deal with Buddhist scriptures, practices, and ideas. For this reason, most of them have been treated as examples of a category or subgenre of waka called Shakkyoka, “Buddhist poems.”\nYet many Shakkyoka are more like other poems in the waka canon than they are unlike them. In the case of Senshi’s “Buddhist poems,” their language links them to the traditions of secular verse. Moreover, the poems use the essentially secular public literary language of waka to address and express serious and relatively private religious concerns and aspirations. In reading Senshi’s poems, it is as important to think about their relationship to the traditions and conventions of waka and to other waka texts as it is to think about their relationship to Buddhist thoughts, practices, and texts.\nThe Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess creates a context for the reading of Senshi’s poems by presenting what is known and what has been thought about her and them. As such, it is a vital source for any reader of Senshi and other literature of the Heian period.</p>

The Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess: Daisaiin Senshi and Hosshin Wakashu (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Kamens, Edward

Religion & Spirituality

Yosano Akiko and The Tale of Genji (Volume 28) (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

<p><div> <div>Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) has long been recognized as one of the most important literary figures of prewar Japan. Her renown derives principally from the passion of her early poetry and from her contributions to 20th-century debates about women. This emphasis obscures a major part of her career, which was devoted to work on the Japanese classics and, in particular, the great Heian period text <i>The Tale of Genji</i>. Akiko herself felt that <i>Genji</i> was the bedrock upon which her entire literary career was built, and her bibliography shows a steadily increasing amount of time devoted to projects related to the tale. This study traces for the first time the full range of Akiko's involvement with <i>The Tale of Genji</i>.</div> <div><i>The Tale of Genji</i> provided Akiko with her conception of herself as a writer and inspired many of her most significant literary projects. She, in turn, refurbished the tale as a modern novel, pioneered some of the most promising avenues of modern academic research on <i>Genji</i>, and, to a great extent, gave the text the prominence it now enjoys as a translated classic. Through Akiko's work <i>Genji</i> became, in fact as well as in name, an exemplum of that most modern of literary genres, the novel. In delineating this important aspect of Akiko's life and her bibliography, this study aims to show that facile descriptions of Akiko as a "poetess of passion" or "new woman" will no longer suffice.</div> </div></p>

Rowley, Gaye

Rowley, G.

<p><div>As a spokesman for disaffected youth of the post-1960s, Murakami Haruki has become one of the most important voices in contemporary Japanese literature, and he has gained a following in the United States through translations of his works. In <i>Dances with Sheep</i>, Matthew Strecher examines Murakami's fiction--and, to a lesser extent, his nonfiction--for its most prevalent structures and themes. Strecher also delves into the paradoxes in Murakami's writings that confront critics and casual readers alike. Murakami writes of "serious" themes yet expresses them in a relatively uncomplicated style that appeals to high school students as well as scholars; and his fictional work appears to celebrate the pastiche of postmodern expression, yet he rejects the effects of the postmodern on contemporary culture as dangerous.</div> <div>Strecher's methodology is both historical and cultural as he utilizes four distinct yet interwoven approaches to analyze Murakami's major works: the writer's "formulaic" structure with serious themes; his play with magical realism; the intense psychological underpinnings of his literary landscape; and his critique of language and its capacity to represent realities, past and present. <i>Dances with Sheep</i> links each of these approaches with Murakami's critical focus on the fate of individual identity in contemporary Japan. The result is that the simplicity of the Murakami hero, marked by lethargy and nostalgia, emerges as emblematic of contemporary humankind, bereft of identity, direction, and meaning. Murakami's fiction is reconstructed in <i>Dances with Sheep</i> as a warning against the dehumanizing effects of late-model capitalism, the homogenization of the marketplace, and the elimination of effective counterculture in Japan.</div></p>

Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Strecher, Matthew

<p><div>This second, revised edition of a pioneering volume, long out of print, presents translations of Japanese Zen poems on sorrow, old age, homesickness, the seasons, the ravages of time, solitude, the scenic beauty of the landscape of Japan, and monastic life. Composed by Japanese Zen monks who lived from the last quarter of the thirteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth century, these poems represent a portion of the best of the writing called in Japanese <i>gozan bungaku</i>, "literature of the five mountains."</div> <div>"Five mountains" or "five monasteries" refers to the system by which the Zen monasteries were hierarchically ordered and governed. For the monks in the monasteries, poetry functioned as a means not only of expressing religious convictions and personal feelings but also of communicating with others in a civilized and courteous fashion. Effacing barriers of time and space, the practice of Chinese poetry also made it possible for Japanese authors to feel at one with their Chinese counterparts and the great poets of antiquity. This was a time when Zen as an institution was being established and contact with the Chinese mainland becoming increasingly frequent--ten of the sixteen poets represented here visited China.</div> <div>Marian Ury has provided a short but substantial introduction to the Chinese poetry of Japanese <i>gozan</i> monasteries, and her translations of the poetry are masterful. <i>Poems of the Five Mountains</i> is an important work for anyone interested in Japanese literature, Chinese literature, East Asian Religion, and Zen Buddhism.</div></p>

Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Ury, Marian

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Books by U of M Center For Japanese Studies