- The Japanization of Modernity
- Rebecca Suter
- Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami’s fiction, Suter complicates our understanding of the author’s oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific.
- Hardcover 2008
- Love after The Tale of Genji
- Charo B. D'Etcheverry
- The eleventh-century masterpiece The Tale of Genji has become the definitive expression of the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of life in the Heian court. But its brilliance has eclipsed the works of later Heian authors, who have since been displaced from the canon and relegated to critical obscurity. D'Etcheverry calls for a reevaluation of late Heian fiction by shedding new light upon this undervalued body of work and examining three representative texts as legitimate heirs to the literary legacy of Genji.
- Hardcover 2007
- Off Center
- Masao Miyoshi
- In this provocative study, Miyoshi deliberately adopts an off-center perspective--one that restores the historical asymmetry of encounters between Japan and the United States, from Commodore Perry to Douglas MacArthur--to investigate the blindness that has characterized relations between the two cultures.
- Hardcover 1991 / Paperback 1998
- Out of the Alleyway
- Eve Zimmerman
- In this critical study of Nakagami's life and oeuvre, Zimmerman delves into the writer's literary world, exploring the genres, forms, and themes with which Nakagami worked and experimented. These chapters trace the biographical thread running through his works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.
- Hardcover 2008
- Uchida Hyakken
- Rachel DiNitto
- The literary career of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971) encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres. This book takes up Hyakken’s fiction and essays written during Japan’s prewar years to investigate the intersection of his literature with the material and discursive surroundings of the time.
- Hardcover 2008
- When Our Eyes No Longer See
- Gregory Golley
- As industrial and scientific developments in early-twentieth-century Japan transformed the meaning of “objective observation,” modern writers and poets struggled to capture what they had come to see as an evolving network of invisible relations joining people to the larger material universe. For these artists, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.
- Hardcover 2008