From a Japanese master of romantic and sexual obsession come two novels that treat traditional themes with sly wit and startling psychological sophistication. In The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, Junichir Tanizaki reimagines the exploits of a legendary samurai as a sadomasochistic dance between the hero and the wife of his enemy. Arrowroot, though set in the twentieth century, views an adult orphan’s search for his mother’s past through the translucent shoji screen of ancient literature and myth. Both works are replete with shocking juxtapositions. Severed heads become objects of erotic fixation. Foxes take on human shape. An aristocratic lady loves and pities the man she is conspiring to destroy. This supple translation reveals the full scope of Tanizaki’s gift: his confident storytelling, luminous detail, and astonishingly vital female characters.
Everyone talks about style, but no one explains it. The authors of this book do; and in doing so, they provoke the reader to consider style, not as an elegant accessory of effective prose, but as its very heart. At a time when writing skills have virtually disappeared, what can be done? If only people learned the principles of verbal correctness, the essential rules, wouldn't good prose simply fall into place? Thomas and Turner say no. Attending to rules of grammar, sense, and sentence structure will no more lead to effective prose than knowing the mechanics of a golf swing will lead to a hole-in-one. Furthermore, ten-step programs to better writing exacerbate the problem by failing to recognize, as Thomas and Turner point out, that there are many styles with different standards. In the first half of Clear and Simple, the authors introduce a range of styles--reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, and others--contrasting them to classic style. Its principles are simple: The writer adopts the pose that the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader is an intellectual equal, and the occasion is informal. Classic style is at home in everything from business memos to personal letters, from magazine articles to university writing. The second half of the book is a tour of examples--the exquisite and the execrable--showing what has worked and what hasn't. Classic prose is found everywhere: from Thomas Jefferson to Junichirō Tanizaki, from Mark Twain to the observations of an undergraduate. Here are many fine performances in classic style, each clear and simple as the truth. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
At the time of his death in 1965, at the age of 79, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro had been writing fiction, plays, essays, poems, and translations almost without interruption for more than fifty-five years. In this series of meditations on seven of Tanizaki’s novels and novellas, the renowned translator Anthony Chambers focuses on the thread of fantasy that Tanizaki weaves throughout his work. He examines Tanizaki’s subtle use of storytelling devices to evoke his characters’ alternate sense of reality and to encourage the reader’s participation in their fantasies. Employing his intimate knowledge of Tanizaki’s works, Chambers superbly evokes the beauty and truth Tanizaki’s characters find in their ideal worlds.
Perversion and modern Japan focuses on the psychoanalytic approach to the study of modern Japan. Using a wide range of psychoanalytic approaches the contributors to this book have brought together chapters on everything from the Ajase complex to underpants, from fascist modernism in literature to internet-based suicide pacts.
Ann Sherif discusses the life and work of Kòda in light of changes in critical horizons, readerly communities, and especially constructions of gender and the family in the latter half of the twentieth century. Excellent translations of some of Kòda's most provocative short works are included.
With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan opened its doors to the West and underwent remarkable changes as it sought to become a modern nation. Accompanying the political changes that Western trade ushered in were widespread social and cultural changes. Newspapers, novels, poems, and plays from the Western world were soon adapted and translated into Japanese. The combination of the rich storytelling tradition of Japan with the realism and modernism of the West produced some of the greatest literature of the modern age. Historical Dictionary of Modern Japanese Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Japanese literature.
Andrea Dworkin, once called "Feminism's Malcolm X," has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed-but never ignored. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of two generations of feminists. Now the book that she's best known for-in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement-is being reissued for the young women and men of the twenty-first century. Intercourse enraged as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men. (This argument was quickly-and falsely-simplified to "all sex is rape" in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin's already radical persona.) In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse, Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, discusses the circumstances of Dworkin's untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. Dworkin's argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?
This Perversion Called Love positions one of Japan's most canonical and best translated 20th century authors at the center of contemporary debates in feminism. Examining sexual perversion in Tanizaki's aesthetic essays, cultural criticism, cinema writings and short novels from the 1930s, it argues that Tanizaki understands human subjectivity in remarkably Freudian terms, but that he is much more critical than Freud about what it means for the possibility of love. According to Tanizaki, perversion involves not the proliferation of interesting gender positions, but rather the tragic absence of even two sexes, since femininity is only defined as man's absence, supplement, or complement. In this fascinating work, author Margherita Long reads Tanizaki with a theoretical complexity he demands but has seldom received. As a critique of the historicist and gender-focused paradigms that inform much recent work in Japanese literary and cultural studies, This Perversion Called Love offers exciting new interpretations that should spark controversy in the fields of feminist theory and critical Asian studies.
Yasuoka Shōtarō (1920–2013) was perfectly situated to become Japan's premier chronicler of the Shōwa period (1926–89). Over fifty years as a writer, Yasuoka produced stories, novels, plays, and essays, as well as monumental histories that connected his own life to those of his ancestors. He was also the only major Japanese writer to live in the American South during the Civil Rights Movement, when he spent most of an academic year at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In 1977, he translated Alex Haley's Roots into Japanese. For a long period, Yasuoka was at the center of the Japanese literary establishment, serving on prize committees and winning the major literary prizes of the era: the Akutagawa, the Noma, the Yomiuri, and the Kawabata. But what makes Yasuoka fascinating as a writer is the way that he consciously, deliberately resisted accepted narratives of modern Japanese history through his approach to personal and collective memory. In Enduring Postwar, the first literary and biographical study of Yasuoka in English, Kendall Heitzman explores the element of memory in Yasuoka's work in the context of his life and evolving understanding of postwar Japan.
This extraordinary one-volume guide to the modern literatures of China, Japan, and Korea is the definitive reference work on the subject in the English language. With more than one hundred articles that show how a host of authors and literary movements have contributed to the general literary development of their respective countries, this companion is an essential starting point for the study of East Asian literatures. Comprehensive thematic essays introduce each geographical section with historical overviews and surveys of persistent themes in the literature examined, including nationalism, gender, family relations, and sexuality. Following the thematic essays are the individual entries: over forty for China, over fifty for Japan, and almost thirty for Korea, featuring everything from detailed analyses of the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Murakami Haruki, to far-ranging explorations of avant-garde fiction in China and postwar novels in Korea. Arrayed chronologically, each entry is self-contained, though extensive cross-referencing affords readers the opportunity to gain a more synoptic view of the work, author, or movement. The unrivaled opportunities for comparative analysis alone make this unique companion an indispensable reference for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of Asian literature. Although the literatures of China, Japan, and Korea are each allotted separate sections, the editors constantly kept an eye open to those writers, works, and movements that transcend national boundaries. This includes, for example, Chinese authors who lived and wrote in Japan; Japanese authors who wrote in classical Chinese; and Korean authors who write in Japanese, whether under the colonial occupation or because they are resident in Japan. The waves of modernization can be seen as reaching each of these countries in a staggered fashion, with eddies and back-flows between them then complicating the picture further. This volume provides a vivid sense of this dynamic interplay.