Shape-shifters, demons, and lovers populate a landscape blossoming with story in this collection of imaginative contributions by Steve Berman, Eugie Foster, Jay Lake, Yoon Ha Lee, Robert Jordan Levy, Lisa Mantchev, Richard Parks, Ekaterina Sedia, Erzebet YellowBoy, and others.
Baseball has joined America and Japan, even in times of strife, for over 150 years. After the "opening" of Japan by Commodore Perry, Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu explains, baseball was introduced there by American employees of the Japanese government tasked with bringing Western knowledge and technology to the country, and Japanese students in the United States soon became avid players. In the early twentieth century, visiting Japanese warships fielded teams that played against American teams, and a Negro League team arranged tours to Japan. By the 1930s, professional baseball was organized in Japan where it continued to be played during and after World War II; it was even played in Japanese American internment camps in the United States during the war. From early on, Guthrie-Shimizu argues, baseball carried American values to Japan, and by the mid-twentieth century, the sport had become emblematic of Japan's modernization and of America's growing influence in the Pacific world. Guthrie-Shimizu contends that baseball provides unique insight into U.S.-Japanese relations during times of war and peace and, in fact, is central to understanding postwar reconciliation. In telling this often surprising history, Transpacific Field of Dreams shines a light on globalization's unlikely, and at times accidental, participants.
DIVExplores issues of gender, race and national identity in Japan, by taking up for critical analysis an emergent national trend, in which some urban Japanese women turn to the West--through study abroad, work abroad, and romance with Westerners-- in order/div
Since the end of the Second World War—and particularly over the last decade—Japanese science fiction has strongly influenced global popular culture. Unlike American and British science fiction, its most popular examples have been visual—from Gojira (Godzilla) and Astro Boy in the 1950s and 1960s to the anime masterpieces Akira and Ghost in the Shell of the 1980s and 1990s—while little attention has been paid to a vibrant tradition of prose science fiction in Japan. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams remedies this neglect with a rich exploration of the genre that connects prose science fiction to contemporary anime. Bringing together Western scholars and leading Japanese critics, this groundbreaking work traces the beginnings, evolution, and future direction of science fiction in Japan, its major schools and authors, cultural origins and relationship to its Western counterparts, the role of the genre in the formation of Japan’s national and political identity, and its unique fan culture. Covering a remarkable range of texts—from the 1930s fantastic detective fiction of Yumeno Kyûsaku to the cross-culturally produced and marketed film and video game franchise Final Fantasy—this book firmly establishes Japanese science fiction as a vital and exciting genre. Contributors: Hiroki Azuma; Hiroko Chiba, DePauw U; Naoki Chiba; William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College; Mari Kotani; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, Stanford U; Susan Napier, Tufts U; Sharalyn Orbaugh, U of British Columbia; Tamaki Saitô; Thomas Schnellbächer, Berlin Free U. Christopher Bolton is assistant professor of Japanese at Williams College. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. is professor of English at DePauw University. Takayuki Tatsumi is professor of English at Keio University.
Dreams, Myths and Fairy Tales in Japan addresses Japanese culture insightfully, exploring the depths of the psyche from both Eastern and Western perspectives, an endeavor the author is uniquely suited to undertake. The present volume is based upon five lectures originally delivered at the prestigious round-table Eranos Conferences in Ascona, Switzerland. Readers interested in Japanese myth and religion, comparative cultural studies, depth psychology or clinical psychology will all find Professor Kawai’s offerings to be remarkably insightful while at the same time practical for their own daily work. From the contents: –Interpenetration: Dreams in Medieval Japan –Bodies in the Dream Diary of Myôe –Japanese Mythology: Balancing the Gods –Japanese Fairy Tales: The Aesthetic Solution –Torikaebaya: A Tale of Changing Sexual Roles
This book explores social change in Japan at the most intimate site of social interaction - the home - by providing a detailed ethnography of everyday life in a sharehouse that are a deliberate alternative to life in the family home and are considered an experimental space for the construction of new social identities.
Addresses Japanese culture insightfully, exploring the depths of the psyche from both Eastern and Western perspectives, an endeavor the author is uniquely suited to undertake. The present volume is based upon five lectures originally delivered at the prestigious round-table Eranos Conferences in Ascona, Switzerland. Readers interested in Japanese myth and religion, comparative cultural studies, depth psychology or clinical psychology will all find Professor Kawai's offerings to be remarkably insightful while at the same time practical for their own daily work.
The Bridge of Dreams is a brilliant reading of The Tale of Genji that succeeds both as a sophisticated work of literary criticism and as an introduction this world masterpiece. Taking account of current literary theory and a long tradition of Japanese commentary, the author guides both the general reader and the specialist to a new appreciation of the structure and poetics of this complex and often seemingly baffling work. The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu, is Japan's most outstanding work of prose fiction. Though bearing a striking resemblance to the modern psychological novel, the Genji was not conceived and written as a single work and then published and distributed to a mass audience as novels are today. Instead, it was issued in limited installments, sequence by sequence, to an extremely circumscribed, aristocratic audience. This study discusses the growth and evolution of the Genji and the manner in which recurrent concerns--political, social, and religious--are developed, subverted, and otherwise transformed as the work evolves from one stage to another. Throughout, the author analyzes the Genji in the context of those literary works and conventions that Murasaki explicitly or implicitly presupposed her contemporary audience to know, and reveals how the Genji works both within and against the larger literary and sociopolitical tradition. The book contains a color frontispiece by a seventeenth-century artist and eight pages of black-and-white illustrations from a twelfth-century scroll. Two appendixes present an analysis of biographical and textual problems and a detailed index of principal characters.