"This book examines the development of Japanese literature depicting the native place (furusato) from the mid-Meiji period through the late 1930s as a way of articulating the uprootedness and sense of loss many experienced as Japan modernized. The 1890s witnessed the appearance of fictional works describing a city dweller who returns to his native place, where he reflects on the evils of urban life and the idyllic past of his childhood home. The book concentrates on four authors who typify this trend: Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki Tōson, Satō Haruo, and Shiga Naoya. All four writers may be understood as trying to make sense of contemporary Japan. Their works reflect their engagement with the social, intellectual, economic, and technological discourses that created a network of shared experience among people of a similar age. This common experience allows the author to chart how these writers’ works contributed to the general debate over Japanese national identity in this period. By exploring the links between furusato literature and the theme of national identity, he shows that the debate over a common language that might “transparently” express the modern experience helped shape a variety of literary forms used to present the native place as a distinctly Japanese experience."

Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature looks at the ways in which authors writing in Japanese in the twentieth century constructed a division between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ in their work. Drawing on methodology from Foucault and Lacan, the clearly presented essays seek to show how Japanese writers have responded to the central question of what it means to be ‘Japanese’ and of how best to define their identity. Taking geographical, racial and ethnic identity as a starting point to explore Japan's vision of 'non-Japan', representations of the Other are examined in terms of the experiences of Japanese authors abroad and in the imaginary lands envisioned by authors in Japan. Using a diverse cross-section of writers and texts as case studies, this edited volume brings together contributions from a number of leading international experts in the field and is written at an accessible level, making it essential reading for those working in Japanese studies, colonialism, identity studies and nationalism.

In Satō Haruo and Modern Japanese Literature, Charles Exley offers the first comprehensive examination of Satō’s literary oeuvre from the 1910s through the 1930s. The study examines the ways in which selected novels and short stories interact with cultural discourses of the time, including the fantastic, the discourse on melancholy and mental illness, detective fiction and early film, colonial encounter and critique of civilization, and hysteria and psychoanalysis. Exley’s alignment of Satō’s fictional work with its cultural and historical context illustrates the complex ways in which Satō’s aesthetic projections derived from and comment on Japan’s experience with modernization during the twentieth century.

"Women entered the book trade in significant numbers in China during the late sixteenth century, when it became acceptable for women from “good families” to write poetry and seek to publish their collected poems. At about the same time, a boom in the publication of fiction began, and semiprofessional novelists emerged.This study begins with three case studies, each of which probes one facet of the relationship between women and fiction in the early nineteenth century. It examines in turn the prefaces written by four women for a novel about women; the activities of a woman editor and writer of fiction; and writings on fiction by three leading literary women. Building on these case studies, the second half of the book focuses on the many sequels to the Dream of the Red Chamber—one of which was demonstrably written by a woman—and the significance of this novel for women. As Ellen Widmer shows, by the end of the century, women were becoming increasingly involved in the novel as critical readers, writers, and editors. And if women and their relationship to fiction changed over the nineteenth century, the novel changed as well, not the least in its growing recognition of the importance of female readers."

The first comprehensive study on the pattern of guilt and wandering in literature, this book examines the relationship between the two complex concepts as they appear in twentieth-century novels, positing its methodological premises on archetypal criticism and both close and distant reading, but also drawing on psychology, anthropology, mythology, and religion. This research deciphers a common paradigm and literary representation whose archetype within Western literature is found in the biblical figure of Cain, while presenting a critical framework valid for boundary-crossing comparative approaches. From Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, to Wolfgang Koeppen’s Death in Rome and Ōoka Shōhei’s Fires on the Plain, this book is not merely a thematic study, but an analysis of the literary phenomena that appear in those novels where the sense of guilt is controversially subjective, or so collective as to be perceived as universal, as is often the case with war and postwar literature. Di Gennaro goes beyond the analysis of explicit rewritings of the story of Cain, in order to uncover the monomyth through its rhetorical structures and mythical methods. The wasteland with no religion; the lost, abandoned garden; the classical and religiously-corrupted city; and the tropical, cannibalistic island at war are the respective settings of these narratives, where the issue is neither homelessness nor journeying, but, rather, the desperate and futile movement toward self-consciousness, or self-destruction. After the Second World War, much was silenced rather than left unsaid. This study retraces those silent cries over history through the powerful literary marks of myths.

" A visitor to Beijing in 1900, Chinese or foreign, would have been struck by the great number of native-place lodges serving the needs of scholars and officials from the provinces. What were these native-place lodges? How did they develop over time? How did they fit into and shape Beijing’s urban ecology? How did they further native-place ties? In answering these questions, the author considers how native-place ties functioned as channels of communication between China’s provinces and the political center; how sojourners to the capital used native-place ties to create solidarity within their communities of fellow provincials and within the class of scholar-officials as a whole; how the state co-opted these ties as a means of maintaining order within the city and controlling the imperial bureaucracy; how native-place ties transformed the urban landscape and social structure of the city; and how these functions were refashioned in the decades of political innovation that closed the Qing period. Native-place lodges are often cited as an example of the particularistic ties that characterized traditional China and worked against the emergence of a modern state based on loyalty to the nation. The author argues that by fostering awareness of membership in an elite group, the native-place lodges generated a sense of belonging to a nation that furthered the reforms undertaken in the early twentieth century. "

"The Burakumin. Stigmatized throughout Japanese history as an outcaste group, their identity is still “risky,” their social presence mostly silent, and their experience marginalized in public discourse. They are contemporary Japan’s largest minority group—between 1.5 and 3 million people. How do young people today learn about being burakumin? How do they struggle with silence and search for an authentic voice for their complex experience?Voice, Silence, and Self examines how the mechanisms of silence surrounding burakumin issues are reproduced and challenged in Japanese society. It explores the ways in which schools and social relationships shape people’s identity as burakumin within a “protective cocoon” where risk is minimized. Based on extensive ethnographic research and interviews, this longitudinal work explores the experience of burakumin youth from two different communities and with different social movement organizations.Christopher Bondy explores how individuals navigate their social world, demonstrating the ways in which people make conscious decisions about the disclosure of a stigmatized identity. This compelling study is relevant to scholars and students of Japan studies and beyond. It provides crucial examples for all those interested in issues of identity, social movements, stigma, and education in a comparative setting."

"Mark Jones examines the making of a new child’s world in Japan between 1890 and 1930 and focuses on the institutions, groups, and individuals that reshaped both the idea of childhood and the daily life of children. Family reformers, scientific child experts, magazine editors, well-educated mothers, and other prewar urban elites constructed a model of childhood—having one’s own room, devoting time to homework, reading children’s literature, playing with toys—that ultimately became the norm for young Japanese in subsequent decades. This book also places the story of modern childhood within a broader social context—the emergence of a middle class in early twentieth century Japan. The ideal of making the child into a “superior student” (yutosei) appealed to the family seeking upward mobility and to the nation-state that needed disciplined, educated workers able to further Japan’s capitalist and imperialist growth. This view of the middle class as a child-centered, educationally obsessed, socially aspiring stratum survived World War II and prospered into the years beyond."

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Interdependent Partners: The Shogunate, Satsuma, and Tsushima -- The Reaction against Globalization -- Guarded Engagement -- Domestic Demand and Foreign Trade -- Local Japan Encounters the West -- The Transition in Foreign Trade -- Defending the Domain and the Realm -- The End of Domain Agency and the Adoption of International Relations -- Works Cited -- Index -- Harvard East Asian Monographs.

This book traces the development of Okinawan literature over the tumultuous past century, during which the island experienced imperial subjectification, wartime annihilation, a protracted American occupation, and reversion to Japan.