Subject Area: Literature - Japanese

Yūshi Hōgen: An Eighteenth- Century Japanese Farce (Translated, with an Introduction by Maryellen Toman Mori)
 Mori, Maryellen Toman
2016 1-4955-0489-1 164 pages
This book is an annotated scholarly study of the Japanese literary text Yūshi hōgen (1770) accompanied by an English translation of that text, Yūshi hōgen belongs to a genre called sharebon (‘books for the stylish’), which flourished in Japan between mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. These were short texts, produced as booklets, which consisted mostly of dialogue and concerned pleasure-quarter culture. They examined the behavior of male visitors to a brothel and purported to advise the would –be ‘sophisticate” on how to conduct himself from start to finish of his pleasure excursion.

Price: $159.95


Erotic Tales from Japan: The Many Shades of Sexual Love
 Mori, Maryellen Toman
2021 1-4955-0900-1 648 pages
Dr. Maryellen Toman Mori has collected this collection of erotic Japanese tales that have been translated into the English language for the first time. It is a collection of 17 stories, written by both male and female authors.

Price: $339.95


Globalization and Dislocation in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro
 Sim, Wai-Chew
2006 0-7734-5691-0 320 pages
This book examines, in thematic and stylistic terms, the six novels that Kazuo Ishiguro has published so far. It is the first study to advance an argument linking these works to wider issues in the interpretation of migrant and cosmopolitan literature. Individual chapters examine Ishiguro’s appropriation of exotic fiction, the countryhouse novel, the high-modernist European novel, detective fiction, and science fiction. From early works that tackle the exigencies of immigrant self-fashioning through the critique of essentialist depictions of Japanese sociality, Ishiguro went on to criticize English exceptionalism in the Booker prize-winning novel, The Remains of the Day. His misrecognition as a supplier of English and Japanese authenticity is adduced as evidence for the fabulist turn of his subsequent work, suggesting that his writing is typified by a propensity to rework the substance of earlier novels in response to their critical and popular reception. Ishiguro breaks new ground in his last two books by raising the issues of distributive justice, progressive nostalgia, and the role of utopian imaginative discourse. This trajectory suggests a need to re-examine dominant theoretical tendencies, in particular those that draw colorful portraits of the delights afforded by cultural flows and exchanges within a decentered and borderless post-imperial global order.

Price: $219.95


Mirror, Gems, and Veil: The Life and Writings of Takahashi Takako (1932-2013)
 Mori, Maryellen Toman
2018 1-4955-0644-4 708 pages
Dr. Mori is a noted scholar and translator of Japanese literature. Her book-list introduction to Takahashi's oeuvre in relation to her life provides astute analyses of Takahashi's major works and positions her in the modern Japanese literary world. The carefully crafted translation of three of Takahashi's major works lets us sample the literary excellence of this female writer.

Price: $379.95


Seasons and Landscapes in Japanese Poetry: An Introduction to haiku and waka
 Marra, Michael F.
2009 0-7734-4907-8 312 pages
This work is an anthology of nearly 500 translated poems, many available in English for the first time, from the eighth to twentieth centuries.

Price: $219.95


The Autobiographical Narrative in Modern Japan: A Study of Kasai Zenzō, a Shi-Shōsetsu Writer
 Nakagawa, Masako [Nakagawa Graham]
2007 0-7734-5396-2 188 pages
This study offers both a chronological description of the literary career of Kasai Zenz? (1887-1928), as well as an historical examination of shi-sh?setsu (a Japanese autobiographical/confessional literary genre) during and after his lifetime. Zenz? was one of the most important shi-sh?setsu authors, living in the Taish? Period (1912-1926) in which this genre was in the height of its ascendancy. In shi-sh?setsu, the “I” novel, the author recounts details of his or her personal life with only a thin veneer of fiction. This genre was believed to be an ideal form of prose writing and an expression of individual depth, created without the fabrications normally found in conventional fiction, making it one of the most striking features of modern Japanese literature. Kasai, living his entire life in poverty, turned to Zen Buddhism for spiritual solace and became both a major architect of the Taish? shi-sh?setsu and its defining author.

Price: $159.95


The Literary Theory of Shimamura Hôgetsu (1871-1918) and the Development of Feminist Discourse in Modern Japan
 Tomasi, Massimiliano
2008 0-7734-5000-9 344 pages
Argues for a reassessment of Hôgetsu’s naturalism as a multifaceted theoretical model rather than an aberration of its original Western counterpart.

Price: $219.95