Exploring Japanese Literature

Author: Giles Murray
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1568365411
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima and Junichiro Tanizaki are all giants of world literature. It stands to reason that students of Japanese would long to read them in their original language. Exploring Japanese Literature enables them to do just that. Featuring one each of these writers’ most characteristic stories—plus linguistic support in the form of a built-in dictionary—the book picks up where the author’s previous bestselling text, Breaking into Japanese Literature, left off. The poignancy of romance between a wealthy Tokyoite and a provincial geisha in Yasunari Kawabata’s "Snow Country"; the ecstatic frenzy of a couple committing ritual suicide in Mishima’s "Patriotism"; the amoral antics of a playboy aesthete trying to fire up his flagging zest for life in Tanizaki’s "The Secret" — Exploring Japanese Literature is a reader’s entrée into the uniquely rich and exotic world of modern Japanese fiction. On each two-page spread, the original Japanese is printed in large type on the left-hand page, with the corresponding English translation on the right and the dictionary running along the bottoms of both. Everything the student needs to read the stories and understand them is right there. To enrich students’ experience even further, Exploring Japanese Literature also features biographies of the three novelists, mini-prefaces that set the scene for the individual stories, and evocative illustrations. In addition, there is a dedicated website at www.speaking-japanese.com where learners have the chance to put forward their own interpretations of the Japanese and engage in debate with the author, the editor and, of course, other readers of the book. Exploring Japanese Literature is recommended for upper-intermediate and advanced level students.

Five Modern Japanese Novelists

Author: Donald Keene
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231507496
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 127

Book Description
The New Yorker has called Donald Keene "America's preeminent scholar of Japanese literature." Now he presents a new book that serves as both a superb introduction to modern Japanese fiction and a memoir of his own lifelong love affair with Japanese literature and culture. Five Modern Japanese Novelistsprofiles five prominent writers whom Donald Keene knew personally: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo, and Shiba Ryotaro. Keene masterfully blends vignettes describing his personal encounters with these famous men with autobiographical observations and his trademark learned literary and cultural analysis. Keene opens with a confession: before arriving in Japan in 1953, despite having taught Japanese for several years at Cambridge, he knew the name of only one living Japanese writer: Tanizaki. Keene's training in classical Japanese literature and fluency in the language proved marvelous preparation, though, for the journey of literary discovery that began with that first trip to Japan, as he came into contact, sometimes quite fortuitously, with the genius of a generation. It is a journey that will fascinate experts and newcomers alike

The Temple of Dawn

Author: Yukio Mishima
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307834328
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
The third novel in the masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, in which a brilliant lawyer will go to nearly any length to discover whether a young Thai princess is in fact the reincarnated spirit of his childhood friend. • “Surpassingly chilling, subtle, and original.” —The New York Times Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend. Travelling in Thailand in the early 1940s, Shigekuni Honda, now a brilliant lawyer, is granted an audience with a young Thai princess—an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. In spite of all reason, he is convinced she is the reincarnated spirit of his friend Kiyoaki. As Honda goes to great lengths to discover for certain if his theory is correct, The Temple of Dawn becomes the story of one man’s obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and his equally passionate search for enlightenment.

House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories

Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525434143
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 126

Book Description
Three surreal, erotically charged stories from Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. In the three long tales in this collection, Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. Piercing examinations of sexuality and human psychology—and works of remarkable subtlety and beauty—these stories showcase one of the twentieth century’s great writers—in any language—at his very best.

Sōseki

Author: John Nathan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546971
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) was the father of the modern novel in Japan, chronicling the plight of bourgeois characters caught between familiar modes of living and the onslaught of Western values and conventions. Yet even though generations of Japanese high school students have been expected to memorize passages from his novels and he is routinely voted the most important Japanese writer in national polls, he remains less familiar to Western readers than authors such as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima. In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Sōseki’s complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Sōseki’s groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Sōseki’s fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer’s life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author. The first full-length study of Sōseki in fifty years, Nathan’s biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated the modernism of the twentieth century.

The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

Author: Jay Rubin
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014139563X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Book Description
This fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the great Japanese short story, from its modern origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable works being written today. Short story writers already well-known to English-language readers are all included here - Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata - but also many surprising new finds. From Yuko Tsushima's 'Flames' to Yuten Sawanishi's 'Filling Up with Sugar', from Shin'ichi Hoshi's 'Shoulder-Top Secretary' to Banana Yoshimoto's 'Bee Honey', The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories is filled with fear, charm, beauty and comedy. Curated by Jay Rubin, who has himself freshly translated several of the stories, and introduced by Haruki Murakami, this book will be a revelation to its readers.

The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

Author: Theodore William Goossen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192803727
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 486

Book Description
Beginning with the first writings to assimilate and rework Western literary traditions, through the flourishing of the short story genre in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Taisho era, to the new breed of writers produced under the constraints of literary censorship, and the current writings reflecting the pitfalls and paradoxes of modern life, this anthology offers a stimulating survey of the entire development of the Japanese short story.

Longing and Other Stories

Author: Jun'ichirō. Tanizaki
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231554419
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 111

Book Description
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki is one of the most eminent Japanese writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his investigations of family dynamics, eroticism, and cultural identity. Most acclaimed for his postwar novels such as The Makioka Sisters and The Key, Tanizaki made his literary debut in 1910. This book presents three powerful stories of family life from the first decade of Tanizaki’s career that foreshadow the themes the great writer would go on to explore. “Longing” recounts the fantastic journey of a precocious young boy through an eerie nighttime landscape. Replete with striking natural images and uncanny human encounters, it ends with a striking revelation. “Sorrows of a Heretic” follows a university student and aspiring novelist who lives in degrading poverty in a Tokyo tenement. Ambitious and tormented, the young man rebels against his family against a backdrop of sickness and death. “The Story of an Unhappy Mother” describes a vivacious but self-centered woman’s drastic transformation after a freak accident involving her son and daughter-in-law. Written in different genres, the three stories are united by a focus on mothers and sons and a concern for Japan’s traditional culture in the face of Westernization. The longtime Tanizaki translators Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy masterfully bring these important works to an Anglophone audience.

Spring Snow

Author: Yukio Mishima
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030783431X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
"A classic of Japanese literature" (Chicago Sun-Times) and the first novel in the masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, set in 1912 Tokyo, featuring an aspiring lawyer who believes he has met the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend. It is 1912 in Tokyo, and the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders—rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power. Shigekuni Honda, an aspiring lawyer and his childhood friend, Kiyoaki Matsugae, are the sons of two such families. As they come of age amidst the growing tensions between old and new, Kiyoaki is plagued by his simultaneous love for and loathing of the spirited young woman Ayakura Satoko. But Kiyoaki’s true feelings only become apparent when her sudden engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion—and leads to a love affair both doomed and inevitable.

Modern Japanese Stories

Author: Ivan I. Morris
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Book Description