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Leith Morton spoke with Shuntaro Tanikawa on 14 November 1997, at the Brighton Hotel, Kyoto, Japan. H e subsequently translated the interview into English.
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This book stands out because many of the contributors are not academics and they bring real-world experience to bear on the issues, using refreshingly jargon-free and straightforward language. Arguments are made in a factual manner with... more
This book stands out because many of the contributors are not academics and they bring real-world experience to bear on the issues, using refreshingly jargon-free and straightforward language. Arguments are made in a factual manner with heavy use of statistics, though often balanced with historical contextualization. All chapters use Nye’s concept of soft power as a starting point and explain from the outset how they build upon his ideas, thereby affording the volume a welcome consistency. This book’s signifi cance—indeed, usefulness—comes from how it implicitly raises a weighty methodological issue that all researchers, whether political scientists, economists, historians, anthropologists, or sociologists, need to seriously entertain: what is the nature of power and how should it be analyzed?
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This book examines literary representations of war, flood and earthquakes in twentieth and twenty-first century Japan using trauma as a focus. The book focuses mainly on poetry but also analyzing various prose works. This topic has been... more
This book examines literary representations of war, flood and earthquakes in twentieth and twenty-first century Japan using trauma as a focus. The book focuses mainly on poetry but also analyzing various prose works. This topic has been explored previously by scholars of European literature but rarely in studies of modern Japanese literature.... Download ebook, read file pdf The Writing of Disaster Literary Representations of War, Trauma and Earthquakes in Modern Japan
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Morton discusses in detail for the first time in English the relationship between The Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki Junichirō’s famous 1948 novel, and two horrifying weather events. The chapter analyses the portrayal of these events, which... more
Morton discusses in detail for the first time in English the relationship between The Makioka Sisters, Tanizaki Junichirō’s famous 1948 novel, and two horrifying weather events. The chapter analyses the portrayal of these events, which form the heart of the work, as literary evocations of the trauma such tragedies create, and also as examples of the author’s unparalleled skill in making these experiences the turning point in his fascinating narrative of the slow decline of one family’s fortunes in pre-war Japan. The Makioka family’s decline parallels Japan’s own slide into chaos and war in the 1930s decade, and the connections between the family’s fate and that of Japan are subtly hinted at in the narrative.
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... The issue of self-censorship hinges on the regret, shame or, simply, embarrass-ment that poets felt after the war ... 398 Self-censorship: the case of wartime Japanese poetry ... Hong Kong will fall The day after, the Philippines will... more
... The issue of self-censorship hinges on the regret, shame or, simply, embarrass-ment that poets felt after the war ... 398 Self-censorship: the case of wartime Japanese poetry ... Hong Kong will fall The day after, the Philippines will bow before us On the next day Singapore will fly the ...
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... 9 Donald Keene, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Time to the Late Sixteenth Century, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993, p ... Hohoemite With a smile on my lips honō mofuman I will walk over fire ya mo ukemu I... more
... 9 Donald Keene, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Time to the Late Sixteenth Century, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993, p ... Hohoemite With a smile on my lips honō mofuman I will walk over fire ya mo ukemu I will be pierced by arrows yasuki nemuri no ...
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Philosophy and Demon
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The notion of a canon is often divided into two separate categories: sacred and secular. The Western sacred canon follows the logic implicit in the etymology of the word which originates in a Semitic root but becomes a Latinization of the... more
The notion of a canon is often divided into two separate categories: sacred and secular. The Western sacred canon follows the logic implicit in the etymology of the word which originates in a Semitic root but becomes a Latinization of the Greek `kanoÅ n’ , a reed. From the historical use of that plant, the word comes to denote a ruler or list. Thus in ecclesiastical parlance, it was used for the holy scripture or, more pertinently, a list of these scriptures. The meaning extends to the division between the Jewish and Christian canons. So, the secular canon, in the speci® c sense that Harold Bloom uses it in his 1994 book, The Western Canon, comes to mean the immortality of certain literary works in terms of their aesthetic power. The need to choose determines Bloom’s historical justi® cation for a literary canon, but the aesthetic merits of his candidates for the `books and school of the ages’ is determined by the judgement of history itself. Bloom also claims that the strong authors whom he champions help determine the course of literary history because of the `anxiety of in ̄ uence’ , a theory he ® rst propounded in 1973 in a book of that name where he argues that `any strong literary work creatively misreads and therefore misinterprets a previous text or texts’ . These propositions are eminently testable and I intend to test them against the example of Yosano Akiko’ s (1878± 1942) famous ® rst collection of tanka poetry, Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901). But ® rst let us consider some other notions of canonicity as this concept provides a useful frame in which to reconsider literary history. If we read Bloom’s book as, in some sense, a defence of the canonÐ however amoral or personal or solitary that might beÐ then other like-minded defenders of the canon come to mind. George Steiner, writing against deconstruction in his 1989 book Real Presences, argues the importance of the `primary text’ . Despite Steiner’s advocacy of an irretrievably personal canonÐ t̀he guarded catalogue of that in speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings’ Ð he nevertheless gestures, in the same way as Bloom, toward the judgement of history, the `best that is known and thought in the world’ . And like Bloom, Steiner argues that great texts shape and create sensibility, the elemental experiences, through the reinven-
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This is the first detailed, comprehensive and critical overview of modern Japanese culture to be published in English. It provides readers with important insights into various dimensions of modern Japanese culture, focusing specifically... more
This is the first detailed, comprehensive and critical overview of modern Japanese culture to be published in English. It provides readers with important insights into various dimensions of modern Japanese culture, focusing specifically upon a number of contemporary Japanese thinkers.
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The short stories of this collection deal with the lives of ordinary people in the context of the changes in Japanese society during the early years of rapid industrialization and later during the Pacific War and its aftermath.
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OSEA HIRATA'S study is the first full-length work on Nishiwaki Junzaburo's poetics in English and provides a stimulating and thoughtprovoking analysis of his poetry. But the book gives us much more than that: we also encounter for... more
OSEA HIRATA'S study is the first full-length work on Nishiwaki Junzaburo's poetics in English and provides a stimulating and thoughtprovoking analysis of his poetry. But the book gives us much more than that: we also encounter for the first time in English an annotated translation of three of Nishiwaki's early (but most important) treatises on poetics, as well as a translation of three of his fourteen collections of poetry (I am counting the two Ambarvalia as separate collections). Thus for students of Japanese literature, this book provides an indispensable introduction to Nishiwaki's poetics and poetry. The preface summarizes the argument contained in Part 2 of the book, putting forward a justification for using a post-modernist thinker such as Jacques Derrida to 'read' a modernist poet. The preface also acknowledges the debt owed to Niikura Toshikazu's monumental concordance to Nishiwaki's poetry for information on sources and references. A brief Introduction contains a sketch of the poet's life until 1926, when he began to publish his first important theoretical essays on poetics. Part 1 begins with a translation of Chogenjitsushugi Shiron, 1929, which is divided into five essays, all published separately. Hirata chose to translate the first three essays published 1927-1928 in Mita Bungaku. The translations, careful and well annotated, illustrate the depth of Nishiwaki's reading, and also, as noted by Donald Keene in Dawn to the West, Nishiwaki's debt to the French surrealists, especially Andre Breton. It is remarkable when reading a text such