"The tortured relationship between Yukiko and Tomioka, a minor official with the Department of Agriculture and Forestry, provides the dramatic center of the novel. Yukiko meets Tomioka while working as a typist for the Japanese ministry in Indochina, where they begin their affair. After the war, Tomioka returns to his wife but remains emotionally inscrutable to Yukiko, refusing to break off their relationship. Meanwhile, Yukiko must find her way in a radically changed Japan. When Yukiko and Tomioka's lives once again cross, the two set down a path shaped by their passion and sense of desperation."--BOOK JACKET.
Set in the years before, during, and after World War II, this classic of modern Japanese literature provides a rich cast of characters drawn from the back alleys of urban Japan and a rare portrait of Japanese colonialism and Japan's postwar experience from the perspective of a woman.
Insisting on collective and common memories, Floating Clouds Beyond the Elastic Limit champions a new national literature grounded in the histories of a restless tribe, we who have found a home away from home. Xi Ni Er’s poetry is alive with awareness of locality and origins – this awareness feeds the present, the future and the past in his work. Wide-ranging in their sweep, the poems go into historical and societal themes, reflecting deep concern and anxiety for the people, the happenings and the objects in a floating city, a transient life, and a pitiless history.
- An inspiring record of many years of conversations by the author with various architects and others, with the aim being to challenge the reader through the presentation of diverse sources of inspiration - Provides a wealth of insight, opinions, and thoughts from 73 architects, 12 artists, 8 photographers, 4 critics, 2 designers, and 1 curator - Illustrated with important works deliberately selected by the author to match the vision of the architect or visionary - An important reference book containing the thoughts and visions of more than 100 architects, designers, artists, and other visionaries In this thought-provoking collection of interviews, Vladimir Belogolovsky reflects on nearly 20 years of conversations with leading architects and others, selecting one essential part to form a question-and-answer that would expose the complexity of their thinking process, while comparing and contrasting them to one another, thereby distilling more than 100 ideas. His engaging narrative captures the stories behind every project and every personality while exploring the important question -- what makes a building architecture? The selection of interviews gathers many answers but inevitably, also many more questions. This book represents people who work in diverse places culturally and climatically and came of age in very different times -- from the revolutionary 1960s to our own time, and as such forms an invaluable reference.
Two novellas, Yellow mud street and Old floating cloud, by one of mainland China's most innovative contemporary writers. Translated by Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang, with a foreword by Charlotte Innes. Can Xue's only other book in English is Dialogues in paradise, published in 1989 by Northwestern U. Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In this collection of passionately argued essays, the internationally acclaimed poet and critic Wai-lim Yip calls Western scholarship to account for its treacherous representation of non-Western literature. Yip moves from Plato to Hans-Georg Gadamer, from Chuang-tzu to Mao Tse-tung, from John Donne to Robert Creeley, as he attempts to create a double consciousness that includes the state of mind of the original author and the expressive potentials of the target language. He aims, first, to expose the types of distortions that have occurred in the process of translation from one language to another and, second, to propose guidelines that will prevent this kind of linguistic violence in the future.
These ingenious interviews will amuse, provoke and delight. Veering from the intensely serious to the wildly silly, Dead Interviews grants writers the chance to sit down with their heroes and flex their cerebral muscles, or simply indulge in some bookish gossip with a deceased icon. Pitch-perfect mimesis meets razor sharp literary criticism in the book that refuses to let dead writers lie. The contributors: Rick Moody on Jimi Hendrix, Cynthia Ozick on Henry James, Douglas Coupland on Andy Warhol, Sam Leith on John Berryman, Geoff Dyer on Friedrich Nietzsche, A. M. Homes on Richard Nixon, David Mitchell on Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, John Burnside on Rachel Carson, ZZ Packer on Monsieur de Saint-George, Michel Faber on Marcel Duchamp, Rebecca Miller on the Marquis de Sade, Ian Rankin on Arthur Conan Doyle and Joyce Carol Oates on Robert Frost.
This book explores the range and dynamism of contemporary Asian cinemas, covering East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia), South Asia (Bollywood), and West Asia (Iran), in order to discover what is common about them and to engender a theory or concept of "Asian Cinema". It goes beyond existing work which provides a field survey of Asian cinema, probing more deeply into the field of Asian Cinema, arguing that Asian Cinema constitutes a separate pedagogical subject, and putting forward an alternative cinematic paradigm. The book covers "styles", including the works of classical Asian Cinema masters, and specific genres such as horror films, and Bollywood and Anime, two very popular modes of Asian Cinema; "spaces", including artistic use of space and perspective in Chinese cinema, geographic and personal space in Iranian cinema, the private "erotic space" of films from South Korea and Thailand, and the persistence of the family unit in the urban spaces of Asian big cities in many Asian films; and "concepts" such as Pan-Asianism, Orientalism, Nationalism and Third Cinema. The rise of Asian nations on the world stage has been coupled with a growing interest, both inside and outside Asia, of Asian culture, of which film is increasingly an indispensable component – this book provides a rich, insightful overview of what exactly constitutes Asian Cinema.
