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.

Musashi

Author: Eiji Yoshikawa
Publisher: Vertical, Inc.
ISBN: 1568364512
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1547

Book Description
The classic samurai novel about the real exploits of the most famous swordsman. Miyamoto Musashi was the child of an era when Japan was emerging from decades of civil strife. Lured to the great Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 by the hope of becoming a samurai—without really knowing what it meant—he regains consciousness after the battle to find himself lying defeated, dazed and wounded among thousands of the dead and dying. On his way home, he commits a rash act, becomes a fugitive and brings life in his own village to a standstill—until he is captured by a weaponless Zen monk. The lovely Otsu, seeing in Musashi her ideal of manliness, frees him from his tortuous punishment, but he is recaptured and imprisoned. During three years of solitary confinement, he delves into the classics of Japan and China. When he is set free again, he rejects the position of samurai and for the next several years pursues his goal relentlessly, looking neither to left nor to right. Ever so slowly it dawns on him that following the Way of the Sword is not simply a matter of finding a target for his brute strength. Continually striving to perfect his technique, which leads him to a unique style of fighting with two swords simultaneously, he travels far and wide, challenging fighters of many disciplines, taking nature to be his ultimate and severest teacher and undergoing the rigorous training of those who follow the Way. He is supremely successful in his encounters, but in the Art of War he perceives the way of peaceful and prosperous governance and disciplines himself to be a real human being He becomes a reluctant hero to a host of people whose lives he has touched and been touched by. And, inevitably, he has to pit his skill against the naked blade of his greatest rival. Musashi is a novel in the best tradition of Japanese story telling. It is a living story, subtle and imaginative, teeming with memorable characters, many of them historical. Interweaving themes of unrequited love, misguided revenge, filial piety and absolute dedication to the Way of the Samurai, it depicts vividly a world Westerners know only vaguely. Full of gusto and humor, it has an epic quality and universal appeal. The novel was made into a three-part movie by Director Hiroshi Inagai. For more information, visit the Shopping area

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.

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

Translanguaging in Translation

Author: Eriko Sato
Publisher: Channel View Publications
ISBN: 1800414951
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
This book brings applied linguistics and translation studies together through an analysis of literary texts in Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Korean and their translations. It examines the traces of translanguaging in translated texts with special focus on the strategic use of scripts, morphemes, words, names, onomatopoeias, metaphors, puns and other contextualized linguistic elements. As a result, the author draws attention to the long-term, often invisible contributions of translanguaging performed by translators to the development of languages and society. The analysis sheds light on the problems caused by monolingualizing forces in translation, teaching and communicative contexts in modern societies, as well as bringing a new dimension to the burgeoning field of translanguaging studies.

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.

Translating Modern Japanese Literature

Author: Richard Donovan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527539873
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
This book presents and comments on four short works of Japanese literature by prominent writers of the early twentieth century, including Natsume Sōseki and Miyazawa Kenji. These are their first-ever published English translations. The book is designed to be used as a textbook for the translation of modern Japanese literature—another first. Each chapter introduces the writer and his work, presents the original Japanese text in its entirety, and encourages students with advanced Japanese to make their own translation of it, before reading the author’s translation that follows. The detailed commentary section in each chapter focuses on two stylistic issues that characterise the source text, and how the target text—the translation—has dealt with them, before the chapter concludes with questions for further discussion and analysis.

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.