<p><div>First published in Japan in 1983, this book is now a classic in modern Japanese literary studies. Covering an astonishing range of texts from the Meiji period (1868-1912), it presents sophisticated analyses of the ways that experiments in literary language produced multiple new--and sometimes revolutionary--forms of sensibility and subjectivity. Along the way, Kamei Hideo carries on an extended debate with Western theorists such as Saussure, Bakhtin, and Lotman, as well as with such contemporary Japanese critics as Karatani Kojin and Noguchi Takehiko.</div> <div><i>Transformations of Sensibility</i> deliberately challenges conventional wisdom about the rise of modern literature in Japan and offers highly original close readings of works by such writers as Futabatei Shimei, Tsubouchi Shoyo, Higuchi Ichiyo, and Izumi Kyoka, as well as writers previously ignored by most scholars. It also provides a new critical theorization of the relationship between language and sensibility, one that links the specificity of Meiji literature to broader concerns that transcend the field of Japanese literary studies. Available in English translation for the first time, it includes a new preface by the author and an introduction by the translation editor that explain the theoretical and historical contexts in which the work first appeared.</div></p>

Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Literature & Fiction

Kamei, Hideo

History & Criticism

U of M Center For Japanese Studies

<p><div>Kurihara Sadako was born in Hiroshima in 1913, and she was there on August 6, 1945. Already a poet before she experienced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, she used her poetic talents to describe the blast and its aftermath. In 1946, despite the censorship of the American Occupation, she published <i>Kuroi tamago</i> (Black Eggs), poems from before, during, and immediately after the war. This volume includes a translation of <i>Kuroi tamago from</i> the complete edition of 1983.</div> <div>But August 6, 1945, was not the end point of Kurihara's journey. In the years after <i>Kuroi tamago</i> she has broadened her focus--to Japan as a victimizer rather than victim, to the threat of nuclear war, to antiwar movements around the world, and to inhumanity in its many guises. She treats events in Japan such as politics in Hiroshima, Tokyo's long-term complicity in American policies, and the decision in 1992 to send Japanese troops on U.N. peacekeeping operations. But she also deals with the Vietnam War, Three Mile Island, Kwangju, Greenham Common, and Tiananmen Square. This volume includes a large selection of these later poems.</div> <div>Kurihara sets us all at ground zero, strips us down to our basic humanity, and shows us the world both as it is and as it could be. Her poems are by turns sorrowful and sarcastic, tender and tough. Several of them are famous in Japan today, but even there, few people appreciate the full force and range of her poetry. And few poets in any country--indeed, few artists of any kind--have displayed comparable dedication, consistency, and insight.</div></p>

Black Eggs: Poems by Kurihara Sadako (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Kurihara, Sadako

Poetry

Essays on the Modern Japanese Church: Christianity in Meiji Japan (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Yamaji, Aizan

Religion & Spirituality

<p><div>As a spokesman for disaffected youth of the post-1960s, Murakami Haruki has become one of the most important voices in contemporary Japanese literature, and he has gained a following in the United States through translations of his works. In <i>Dances with Sheep</i>, Matthew Strecher examines Murakami's fiction--and, to a lesser extent, his nonfiction--for its most prevalent structures and themes. Strecher also delves into the paradoxes in Murakami's writings that confront critics and casual readers alike. Murakami writes of "serious" themes yet expresses them in a relatively uncomplicated style that appeals to high school students as well as scholars; and his fictional work appears to celebrate the pastiche of postmodern expression, yet he rejects the effects of the postmodern on contemporary culture as dangerous.</div> <div>Strecher's methodology is both historical and cultural as he utilizes four distinct yet interwoven approaches to analyze Murakami's major works: the writer's "formulaic" structure with serious themes; his play with magical realism; the intense psychological underpinnings of his literary landscape; and his critique of language and its capacity to represent realities, past and present. <i>Dances with Sheep</i> links each of these approaches with Murakami's critical focus on the fate of individual identity in contemporary Japan. The result is that the simplicity of the Murakami hero, marked by lethargy and nostalgia, emerges as emblematic of contemporary humankind, bereft of identity, direction, and meaning. Murakami's fiction is reconstructed in <i>Dances with Sheep</i> as a warning against the dehumanizing effects of late-model capitalism, the homogenization of the marketplace, and the elimination of effective counterculture in Japan.</div></p>

Dances with Sheep: The Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Strecher, Matthew Carl

<p><div>This second, revised edition of a pioneering volume, long out of print, presents translations of Japanese Zen poems on sorrow, old age, homesickness, the seasons, the ravages of time, solitude, the scenic beauty of the landscape of Japan, and monastic life. Composed by Japanese Zen monks who lived from the last quarter of the thirteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth century, these poems represent a portion of the best of the writing called in Japanese <i>gozan bungaku</i>, "literature of the five mountains."</div> <div>"Five mountains" or "five monasteries" refers to the system by which the Zen monasteries were hierarchically ordered and governed. For the monks in the monasteries, poetry functioned as a means not only of expressing religious convictions and personal feelings but also of communicating with others in a civilized and courteous fashion. Effacing barriers of time and space, the practice of Chinese poetry also made it possible for Japanese authors to feel at one with their Chinese counterparts and the great poets of antiquity. This was a time when Zen as an institution was being established and contact with the Chinese mainland becoming increasingly frequent--ten of the sixteen poets represented here visited China.</div> <div>Marian Ury has provided a short but substantial introduction to the Chinese poetry of Japanese <i>gozan</i> monasteries, and her translations of the poetry are masterful. <i>Poems of the Five Mountains</i> is an important work for anyone interested in Japanese literature, Chinese literature, East Asian Religion, and Zen Buddhism.</div></p>

Poems of the Five Mountains: An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Ury, Marian

An interesting and pioneering study of early state emergence in the Nara Basin

Protohistoric Yamato: Archaeology of the First Japanese State (Volume 78) (Michigan Papers in Japanese Studies)

History

Barnes, Gina

Barnes, Gina L.

Americas

The short stories that Noma Hiroshi produced in the years of confusion and self-questioning after World War II struck a deep response in his readers.In the three stories contained here--""Dark Pictures,"" ""A Feeling of Disintegration,"" and ""A Red Moon in Her Face""--the main characters are all young men who have lived through the war but have emerged far from unscathed.The ""dark pictures"" of the title refer to paintings and engravings by Brueghel, which the protagonist and his friends had viewed together. The miseries depicted in Brueghel's work seem in retrospect to encapsulate all the miseries the main character has suffered since seeing his friends: persecution, self-doubt, sexual anxiety, warfare, imprisonment, bombardment, and the miseries of life in Japan after the defeat.The other two stories are set in the postwar world of black marketeers and bombsites, but they too concern young men whose universal anxieties about sexual desires and their place in the world are overshadowed by memories of the brutality of war.

“Dark Pictures” and Other Stories (Volume 30) (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Noma, Hiroshi

Dark Pictures and Other Stories (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 30) (Volume 30)

Local Voices, National Issues: The Impact of Local Initiative in Japanese Policy-Making (Volume 31) (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

<p>This volume of essays is the first comprehensive publication in English of the work of Miyake Hitoshi, a distinguished scholar of Shugendō (mountain asceticism) and one of the foremost researchers on Japanese folk religion. Miyake defines folk religion as “religion that merges from the necessities of community life.” In Miyake’s systematic methodological and theoretical approach, Shugendō is a classic example of Japanese folk religion, for it blends many traditions (shamanism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Shinto) into a distinctive Japanese religious worldview and is typical of Japanese religion generally.<br />
The first part of this book is devoted to Shugendō’s history, organization, ritual, austerities, thought, and cosmology. Related subjects include exorcism and the exclusion of women. The second part of the book provides research and reflection on Japanese folk religion, including essays on the idea of nature, worldly benefits, new religions, death and rebirth, and the structure of folk religion.\nShugendō: Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion clarifies much of the logic behind Japanese religious syncretism. It is essential reading not only for those interested in Japanese history, culture, and religion but also for those studying world religions and folk culture.</p>

Shugendo: Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion (Volume 32) (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies)

Miyake, Hitoshi

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Books by U of M Center For Japanese Studies