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.

Print Journalism provides an up-to-date overview of the skills needed to work within the newspaper and magazine industries. This critical approach to newspaper and magazine practice highlights historical, theoretical, ethical and political debates and includes tips on the everyday skills of newspaper and magazine journalists, as well as tips for online writing and production. Crucial skills highlighted include: sourcing the news interviewing sub editing feature writing and editing reviewing designing pages pitching features In addition separate chapters focus on ethics, reporting courts, covering politics and copyright whilst others look at the history of newspapers and magazines, the structure of the UK print industry (including its financial organization) and the development of journalism education in the UK, helping to place the coverage of skills within a broader, critical context. All contributors are experienced practicing journalists as well as journalism educators from a broad range of UK universities.

From the author of international bestseller Convenience Store Woman comes a collection of short fiction: weird, out of this world and like nothing you've read before. An engaged couple falls out over the husband's dislike of clothes and objects made from human materials; a young girl finds herself deeply enamoured with the curtain in her childhood bedroom; people honour their dead by eating them and then procreating. Published in English for the first time, this exclusive edition also includes the story that first brought Sayaka Murata international acclaim: 'A Clean Marriage', which tells the story of a happily asexual couple who must submit to some radical medical procedures if they are to conceive a longed-for child. Mixing taboo-breaking body horror with feminist revenge fables, old ladies who love each other and young women finding empathy and transformation in unlikely places, Life Ceremony is a wild ride to the outer edges of one of the most original minds in contemporary fiction.

This book deals with the importance of interculturality in teacher education and training. It is mostly through the concept of intercultural competence that interculturality has been constructed and problematized for educators. However, different approaches and paradigms are available and differ and/or share similarities in terms of ideology, method, practice, theoretical frameworks, and ethical considerations. There is no global agreement on the meanings of interculturality in teacher education and training, although some principles might be common across national borders. There is thus a need for educators to consider these aspects of interculturality in education to be able to become better teachers in a diverse world like ours.

Fukushima Fiction introduces readers to the powerful literary works that have emerged out of Japan’s triple disaster, now known as 3/11. The book provides a broad and nuanced picture of the varied literary responses to this ongoing tragedy, focusing on “serious fiction” (junbungaku), the one area of Japanese cultural production that has consistently addressed the disaster and its aftermath. Examining short stories and novels by both new and established writers, author Rachel DiNitto effectively captures this literary tide and names it after the nuclear accident that turned a natural disaster into an environmental and political catastrophe. The book takes a spatial approach to a new literary landscape, tracing Fukushima fiction thematically from depictions of the local experience of victims on the ground, through the regional and national conceptualizations of the disaster, to considerations of the disaster as history, and last to the global concerns common to nuclear incidents worldwide. Throughout, DiNitto shows how fiction writers played an important role in turning the disaster into a narrative of trauma that speaks to a broad readership within and outside Japan. Although the book examines fiction about all three of the disasters—earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns—DiNitto contends that Fukushima fiction reaches its critical potential as a literature of nuclear resistance. She articulates the stakes involved, arguing that serious fiction provides the critical voice necessary to combat the government and nuclear industry’s attempts to move the disaster off the headlines as the 2020 Olympics approach and Japan restarts its idle nuclear power plants. Rigorous and sophisticated yet highly readable and relevant for a broad audience, Fukushima Fiction is a critical intervention of humanities scholarship into the growing field of Fukushima studies. The work pushes readers to understand the disaster as a global crisis and to see the importance of literature as a critical medium in a media-saturated world. By engaging with other disasters—from 9/11 to Chernobyl to Hurricane Katrina—DiNitto brings Japan’s local and national tragedy to the attention of a global audience, evocatively conveying fiction’s power to imagine the unimaginable and the unforeseen.

'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.

The Little House is set in the early years of the Showa era (1926-89), when Japan's situation is becoming increasingly tense but has not yet fully immersed in a wartime footing. On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped roof. There a woman named Taki has worked as a maidservant in the house and lived with its owners, the Hirai family. Now, near the end of her life, Taki is writing down in a notebook her nostalgic memories of the time spent living in the house. Her journal captures the refined middle-class life of the time from her gentle perspective. At the end of the novel, however, a startling final chapter is added. The chapter brings to light, after Taki's death, a fact not described in her notebook. This suddenly transforms the world that had been viewed through the lens of a nostalgic memoir, so that a dramatic, flesh-and-blood story takes shape. Nakajima manages to combine skillful dialogue with a dazzling ending. The result is a polished, masterful work fully deserving of the Naoki Prize.

History is the true record of an absent past. The trust between historians and their readers has always been founded upon this traditional claim. In a postmodern world, that claim and that trust have both been challenged as never before, drawing either angry or apologetic responses from historians. Hermeneutics, History and Memory answers differently. It sees the sceptical challenge as an opportunity for reflection on history’s key processes and practices, and draws upon methodological resources that are truly history’s own, but from which it has become estranged. In seeking to restore these resources, to return history to its roots, this book presents a novel contribution to topical academic debate, focusing principally upon: the challenges and detours of historical methodology hermeneutic interpretation in history the work of Paul Ricoeur the relation between history and memory. Hermeneutics, History and Memory will appeal to experienced historical researchers who seek to explore the theoretical and methodological foundations of their empirical investigations. It will also be highly beneficial to research students in history and the social sciences concerned with understanding the principles and practices through which documentary analysis and in-depth interview can be both validated and conducted.

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies draws on the notion of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form. Each entry in the volume is around 1,000 words, the style more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors reflecting on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The emphasis on travelogues and other cultural representations of mobility drawn from a range of national and linguistic traditions ensures that the volume has a comparative dimension; the aim is to give an overview of each term in its historical and theoretical complexity, providing readers with a clear sense of how the selected words are essential to a critical understanding of travel writing. Each entry is complemented by an annotated bibliography of five essential items suggesting further reading.