When the body of Saga Atsushi, Japan’s preeminent connoisseur of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), is pulled from the ocean off the coast of Tohoku, having apparently committed suicide, the shocked Japanese art world turns out to mourn his death. Among them is Ryohei, an up-and-coming young ukiyo-e scholar and research assistant to Saga’s colleague-turned-rival, Professor Nishijima. But a chance encounter with an old friend makes Ryohei wonder if there might be more to Saga’s death than meets the eye…
When the body of Saga Atsushi, Japan's preeminent connoisseur of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), is pulled from the ocean off the coast of Tohoku, having apparently committed suicide, the shocked Japanese art world turns out to mourn his death. Among them is Ryohei, an up-and-coming young ukiyo-e scholar and research assistant to Saga's colleague-turned-rival, Professor Nishijima. But a chance encounter with an old friend makes Ryohei wonder if there might be more to Saga's death than meets the eye...
Everyone knows this country and no one knows it. This issue presents twenty new Japans by its writers and artists, and by residents and visitors and neighbours. A special edition of Granta published simultaneously in Japanese and English.
'If we want to understand what has been lost to time, there is no way other than through the exercise of imagination ... imagination applied with delicate rather than broad strokes'. So wrote the award winning Japanese author Kyoko Nakajima of her story, Things Remembered and Things Forgotten, a piece that illuminates, as if by throwing a switch, the layers of wartime devastation that lie just below the surface of Tokyo's insistently modern culture. The ten acclaimed stories in this collection are pervaded by an air of Japanese ghostliness. In beautifully crafted and deceptively light prose, Nakajima portrays men and women beset by cultural amnesia and unaware of how haunted they are - by fragmented memories of war and occupation, by fading traditions, by buildings lost to firestorms and bulldozers, by the spirits of their recent past.
Japan has a long history of weird and supernatural literature, but it has been introduced into English only haphazardly until now. The first volume of a 3-volume anthology covering over two centuries of kaiki literature, including both short stories and manga, from Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu Monogatari of 1776 to Kyogoku Natsuhiko's modern interpretations of popular tales. Selected and with commentary by Higashi Masao, a recognized researcher and author in the field, the series systemizes and introduces the scope of the field and helps establish it as a genre of its own. This first volume presents a variety of work focusing on pre-modern Japan, and includes one manga.
Describes the methods used to make artistic, literary, documentary, and political forgeries and the recent scientific advances in their detection. Includes over 600 objects from the British Museum and many other major collections, from ancient Babylonia to the present day.
"Through detailed examinations of passages from classic films, Marilyn Fabe supplies the analytic tools and background in film history and theory to enable us to see more in every film we watch"--Page [4] of cover.
Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, in Desiring Arabs Joseph A. Massad reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization. A work of impressive scope and erudition, Massad’s chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture. “A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected topic. . . . I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work.”—Khaled El-Rouayheb, Middle East Report “In Desiring Arabs, [Edward] Said’s disciple Joseph A. Massad corroborates his mentor’s thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanizing. . . . [Massad] brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalized, orientalist discourse up to the present.”—Financial Times
Fanning the Flames examines the worlds of fans in the exuberant and commercialized popular culture of contemporary Japan. The works collected here profile denizens of all-night rap clubs; sumo stable patrons; passionate fan clubs of a professional baseball team; enthusiasts of traditional rakugo storytelling; a club of middle-aged female fans of a popular music star; youthful followers of Japan's longest-running rock band; vinyl record collectors; and a thriving community of girls and women who produce and devour amateur comics. Grounded in close, often extended fieldwork with the fans themselves, each case study is an effort to understand both the personal pleasures and political economies of fandoms. The contributors explore the many ways that fans in and of Japanese mass culture actively search for intimacy and identity amid the powerful corporate structures that produce the leisure and entertainment of today's Japan.
A novel of two expeditions, a century apart, that “conjures the Antarctic convincingly . . . in its vastness and implacable indifference to human life” (The New York Times Book Review). In 1913, three explorers—Dinners, Millet-Bass, and Napps—volunteer to leave their ship, the Kismet, and scout an uncharted and unknown island in the Antarctic, which Napps names “Everland.” While all three are enticed by the promise of adventure and reward, they are immortalized by the disastrous outcome of the expedition, their stories preserved for posterity. In 2012, Brix, Jess, and Decker—three researchers with their own reasons for being so far from home—set out on a centenary field trip to survey the same island. Their equipment is more advanced than the previous group’s, and their purpose more scientific—but the weather of Everland remains an unpredictable and deadly force, and under the harsh ultraviolet light of a sun which doesn’t set, isolated from the world, they begin to echo the expedition of a hundred years ago. “Nothing short of stunning: an adventure story, a psychological investigation of physical and mental breakdown, and a remarkable account of weather and endeavor.” —The Guardian
