Tales of the Tokugawa II
Author: James Seguin De Benneville
Publisher:
Published: 1921
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13:
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Musui's Story
Author: Katsu Kokichi
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 2023-02-21
Total Pages: 202
ISBN-13: 0816552363
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA series of picaresque adventures set against the backdrop of a Japan still closed off from the rest of the world, Musui's Story recounts the escapades of samurai Katsu Kokichi. As it depicts Katsu stealing, brawling, indulging in the pleasure quarters, and getting the better of authorities, it also provides a refreshing perspective on Japanese society, customs, economy, and human relationships. From childhood, Katsu was given to mischief. He ran away from home, once at thirteen, making his way as a beggar on the great trunk road between Edo and Kyoto, and again at twenty, posing as the emissary of a feudal lord. He eventually married and had children but never obtained official preferment and was forced to supplement a meager stipend by dealing in swords, selling protection to shopkeepers, and generally using his muscle and wits. Katsu's descriptions of loyalty and kindness, greed and deception, vanity and superstition offer an intimate view of daily life in nineteenth-century Japan unavailable in standard history books. Musui's Story will delight not only students of Japan's past but also general readers who will be entranced by Katsu's candor and boundless zest for life.
Strange Tales from Edo
Author: William D. Fleming
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2024-09-09
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 1684176875
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Strange Tales from Edo, William Fleming paints a sweeping picture of Japan’s engagement with Chinese fiction in the early modern period (1600–1868). Large-scale analyses of the full historical and bibliographical record—the first of their kind—document in detail the wholesale importation of Chinese fiction, the market for imported books and domestic reprint editions, and the critical role of manuscript practices—the ascendance of print culture notwithstanding—in the circulation of Chinese texts among Japanese readers and writers. Bringing this big picture to life, Fleming also traces the journey of a text rarely mentioned in studies of early modern Japanese literature: Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from Liaozhai Studio). An immediate favorite of readers on the continent, Liaozhai was long thought to have been virtually unknown in Japan until the modern period. Copies were imported in vanishingly small numbers, and the collection was never reprinted domestically. Yet beneath this surface of apparent neglect lies a rich hidden history of engagement and rewriting—hand-copying, annotation, criticism, translation, and adaptation—that opens up new perspectives on both the Chinese strange tale and its Japanese counterparts.
The Tale of Genji
Author: John T. Carpenter
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Published: 2019-03-04
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 1588396657
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWith its vivid descriptions of courtly society, gardens, and architecture in early eleventh-century Japan, The Tale of Genji—recognized as the world’s first novel—has captivated audiences around the globe and inspired artistic traditions for one thousand years. Its female author, Murasaki Shikibu, was a diarist, a renowned poet, and, as a tutor to the young empress, the ultimate palace insider; her monumental work of fiction offers entry into an elaborate, mysterious world of court romance, political intrigue, elite customs, and religious life. This handsomely designed and illustrated book explores the outstanding art associated with Genji through in-depth essays and discussions of more than one hundred works. The Tale of Genji has influenced all forms of Japanese artistic expression, from intimately scaled albums to boldly designed hanging scrolls and screen paintings, lacquer boxes, incense burners, games, palanquins for transporting young brides to their new homes, and even contemporary manga. The authors, both art historians and Genji scholars, discuss the tale’s transmission and reception over the centuries; illuminate its place within the history of Japanese literature and calligraphy; highlight its key episodes and characters; and explore its wide-ranging influence on Japanese culture, design, and aesthetics into the modern era. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}
Reading the Tale of Genji
Author: Richard Stanley-Baker
Publisher: Global Oriental
Published: 2009-10-01
Total Pages: 243
ISBN-13: 9004212973
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis new volume in Genji studies comprises a collection of six individual essays by leading international scholars addressing the Tale of Genji Scrolls and the Tale of Genji texts in the context of new critical theory relating to cultural studies, narrative painting, narratology, comparative literature and a global view of medieval romance. Uniquely, it also links new critical theory with multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary interests. Increasingly, scholarly research views ‘reading’ The Tale of Genji Scrolls as an inseparable part of ‘reading’ the Tale of Genji itself. Hence this book, which is subdivided into three sections: Reading the Genji Scrolls; Reading the Genji Texts; Reading the Genji Romance. The contributors are Yukio Lippit (Harvard), Sano Midori (Gakushuin), Richard Okada (Princeton), Murakami Fuminobu (Hong Kong), Jeremy Tambling (Manchester) and Richard Stanley-Baker (formerly Hong Kong)
Envisioning the Tale of Genji
Author: Haruo Shirane
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 427
ISBN-13: 0231142374
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBringing together scholars from across the world, Haruo Shirane presents a fascinating portrait of The Tale of Genji's reception and reproduction over the past thousand years. The essays examine the canonization of the work from the late Heian through the medieval, Edo, Meiji, Taisho, Showa, and Heisei periods, revealing its profound influence on a variety of genres and fields, including modern nation building. They also consider parody, pastiche, and re-creation of the text in various popular and mass media. Since the Genji was written by a woman for female readers, contributors also take up the issue of gender and cultural authority, looking at the novel's function as a symbol of Heian court culture and as an important tool in women's education. Throughout the volume, scholars discuss achievements in visualization, from screen painting and woodblock prints to manga and anime. Taking up such recurrent themes as cultural nostalgia, eroticism, and gender, this book is the most comprehensive history of the reception of The Tale of Genji to date, both in the country of its origin and throughout the world.
Sino-Japanese Reflections
Author: Joshua A. Fogel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2022-05-09
Total Pages: 359
ISBN-13: 3110776987
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSino-Japanese Reflections offers ten richly detailed case studies that examine various forms of cultural and literary interaction between Japanese and Chinese intellectuals from the late Ming to the early twentieth century. The authors consider efforts by early modern scholars on each side of the Yellow Sea to understand the language and culture of the other, to draw upon received texts and forms, and to contribute to shared literary practices. Whereas literary and cultural flow within the Sinosphere is sometimes imagined to be an entirely unidirectional process of textual dissemination from China to the periphery, the contributions to this volume reveal a more complex picture: highlighting how literary and cultural engagement was always an opportunity for creative adaptation and negotiation. Examining materials such as Chinese translations of Japanese vernacular poetry, Japanese engagements with Chinese supernatural stories, adaptations of Japanese historical tales into vernacular Chinese, Sinitic poetry composed in Japan, and Japanese Sinology, the volume brings together recent work by literary scholars and intellectual historians of multiple generations, all of whom have a strong comparative interest in Sino-Japanese studies.
Early Modern Japanese Literature
Author: Haruo Shirane
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2008-04-21
Total Pages: 572
ISBN-13: 9780231516143
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis abridged edition of Haruo Shirane's popular anthology, Early Modern Japanese Literature, retains the essential texts that have made the original volume such a valuable resource. The book introduces English-speaking readers to prose fiction genres, including dangibon, kibyoshi (satiric picture books), sharebon (books of wit and fashion), yomihon, kokkeibon (books of humor), gokan (bound books), and ninjobon (books of romance and sentiment). It also features poetic genres such as waka, haiku, senryu, and kyoka, and plays ranging from Chikamatsu's puppet plays to nineteenth-century kabuki. Readers will continue to benefit from the anthology's selection of significant essays, treatises, literary criticism, folk stories, and other noncanonical works, as well as the numerous prints that accompanied these works. They will also find Shirane's introductions and critical commentary, which guide the reader through the allusive and often elliptical nature of these incredible selections.
An Imperial Concubine's Tale
Author: G. G. Rowley
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 282
ISBN-13: 0231158548
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJapan in the early seventeenth century was a wild place. Serial killers stalked the streets of Kyoto at night, while noblemen and women mingled freely at the imperial palace, drinking saké and watching kabuki dancing in the presence of the emperor's principal consort. Among these noblewomen was an imperial concubine named Nakanoin Nakako, who in 1609 became embroiled in a sex scandal involving both courtiers and young women in the emperor's service. As punishment, Nakako was banished to an island in the Pacific Ocean, but she never reached her destination. Instead, she was shipwrecked and spent fourteen years in a remote village on the Izu Peninsula before she was finally allowed to return to Kyoto. In 1641, Nakako began a new adventure: she entered a convent and became a Buddhist nun. Recounting the remarkable story of this resilient woman and her war-torn world, G. G. Rowley investigates aristocratic family archives, village storehouses, and the records of imperial convents. She follows the banished concubine as she endures rural exile, receives an unexpected reprieve, and rediscovers herself as the abbess of a nunnery. While unraveling Nakako's unusual tale, Rowley also reveals the little-known lives of samurai women who sacrificed themselves on the fringes of the great battles that brought an end to more than a century of civil war. Written with keen insight and genuine affection, An Imperial Concubine's Tale tells the true story of a woman's extraordinary life in seventeenth-century Japan.
Idealism, Protest, and the Tale of Genji
Author: James McMullen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 574
ISBN-13: 9780198152514
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book takes a fresh look at early modern Japanese Confucian thought through a study of Kumazawa Banzan (1619-91). It argues that, contrary to the often-held view that Confucianism was an ideological tool used to support the current regime, Banzan's thought suggests that the traditioncontained elements subversive to the status quo: Banzan is presented as a figure of protest. The book explores his stormy relations with feudal authority and his remonstrations against contemporary maladministration. Banzan also criticized the historical militarization of Japanese societyand high consumption, which he believed to cause deforestation and climatic warming. His thinking extended to metaphysics and the question of Japan's national identity. A remarkable feature of his thought was his identification of an arcadian society in the Tale of Genji, a book condemned bymost of his fellow Confucian thinkers. This book is based on Banzan's written works, both published and in manuscript, his correspondence, and other contemporary sources.
