Japan: Fictions and Reality

Japan: Fictions and Reality PDF Author: Aleksandra Jarosz
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika
ISBN: 8323145040
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 21

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Book Description
edited by Aleksandra Jarosz and Aleksandra Jaworowicz-Zimny in collaboration with Karli Shimizu “Japan is a country with no minorities.” “Japanese society is the most homogenous in the world.” “Japan is the most religiously tolerant country in the world.” “The Japanese are always subservient and polite.” “The Japanese have no sense of humor.” Are these fiction or reality? We cannot guarantee you any firm answers. We can, however, assure you that each of the 28 chapters of this volume should bring you closer to an understanding of the reality of Japan at the turn of Reiwa. „W Japonii nie ma mniejszości.” „Japonia ma najbardziej jednolite społeczeństwo na świecie.” „Japonia to kraj o największej na świecie tolerancji religijnej.” „Japończycy są zawsze usłużni i grzeczni.” „Japończycy nie mają poczucia humoru.” Fikcja czy rzeczywistość? Choć nie możemy zaproponować Czytelnikom oczywistych odpowiedzi, zapewniamy, że każdy z 28 rozdziałów niniejszego zbioru przybliży Ich do zrozumienia rzeczywistości Japonii u progu ery Reiwa. Tom V z serii Japonica Toruniensis

Fukushima Fiction

Fukushima Fiction PDF Author: Rachel DiNitto
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824879457
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
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.

Cloud of Sparrows

Cloud of Sparrows PDF Author: Takashi Matsuoka
Publisher: Delacorte Press
ISBN: 0440333970
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
“Exotic, entertaining . . . [an] exceptional first novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle The year is 1861. After two centuries of isolation, Japan has opened its doors to the West. And as foreign ships threaten to rain destruction on the Shogun’s castle in Edo, a small group of American missionaries has arrived to spread the word of their God. They have yet to realize that their future in Japan has already been foreseen. For a young nobleman has dreamt that his life will be saved by an outsider in the New Year. . . and it is said that Lord Genji has the gift of prophecy. What happens next—when the handsome lord meets an appa rently reformed gunslinger and a woman in flight from her own destructive beauty—sets the stage for a remarkable adventure. For as this unlikely band embarks on a journey through a landscape bristling with danger, East and West, flesh and spirit, past and future, collide in ways no one—least of all Genji—could have imagined. Praise for Cloud of Sparrows “The book seizes you from start to finish.”—The Washington Post “Adventure-filled.”—Entertainment Weekly “Rich . . . with an ambitious, unexpected ending that cuts deeper than a samurai sword.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Legends of the Samurai

Legends of the Samurai PDF Author: Hiroaki Sato
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468301373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
This authoritative history of Japan’s elite warrior class separates fact from myth as it chronicles centuries of samurai combat, culture, and legend. In Legends of the Samurai, Hiroaki Sato examines the history of these medieval Japanese warriors, as well as the many long-standing myths that surround them. In doing so, he presents an authentic and revealing picture of these men and their world. Sato’s masterful translations of original samurai tales, laws, dicta, reports, and arguments are accompanied by insightful commentary. With incisive historical research, this volume chronicles the changing ethos of the Japanese warrior from the samurai's historical origins to his rise to political power. A fascinating look at Japanese history as seen through the evolution of the samurai, Legends of the Samurai stands as the ultimate authority on its subject.

Red Girls

Red Girls PDF Author: Kazuki Sakuraba
Publisher: VIZ Media LLC
ISBN: 1421583283
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
When the Outland People abandoned a baby girl on the outskirts of a village, few imagined that she would grow up to marry into the illustrious Akakuchiba family, much less that she would develop clairvoyant abilities and become matriarch of the illustrious ironworking clan. Her daughter shocks the village further by joining a motorcycle gang and becoming a famous manga artist. The Outlander’s granddaughter Toko—well, she’s nobody at all. A nobody worth entrusting with the secret that her grandmother was a murderer. This is Toko’s story. -- VIZ Media

Eight Million Gods

Eight Million Gods PDF Author: Wen Spencer
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
ISBN: 1625791038
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
A contemporary fantasy of mystery and death as American expats battle Japanese gods and monsters to retrieve an ancient artifact that can destroy the world. On Saturday afternoon, Nikki Delany thought, "George Wilson, in the kitchen, with a blender." By dinner, she had killed George and posted his gory murder to her blog. The next day, she put on her mourning clothes and went out to meet her best friend for lunch to discuss finding a replacement for her love interest. Nikki is a horror novelist. Her choice of career is dictated by an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that forces her to write stories of death and destruction. She can't control it, doesn't understand it, but can use it to make money anywhere in the world. Currently "anywhere" is in Japan, hiding from her mother who sees Nikki's OCD as proof she's mentally unstable. Nikki's fragile peace starts to fall apart when the police arrest her for the murder of an American expatriate. Someone killed him with a blender. Reality starts to unravel around Nikki. She's attacked by a raccoon in a business suit. After a series of blackouts, shes accompanied by a boy that no one else can see, a boy who claims to be a god. Is she really being pursued by Japanese myths¾or is she simply going insane? What Nikki does know for sure is that the bodies are piling up, her mother has arrived in Japan to lock her up for the rest of her life¾and her novels always end with everyone dead. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature

Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature PDF Author: Noriko Mizuta Lippit
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351696882
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This title was first published in 1980. In twentieth century Japanese literature, the opposition and interaction of realism and romanticism on the level of literary concepts, and of Marxism and aestheticism (including, in part, modernism) on the level of literary ideology, supplies a most vital basis for writers searching for new methods of literary expression, fostering debates among the writers and creating the setting for active experimentation with style, form and language. This study is a result of an extended stay in the United States by the author who turned increasingly toward questioning and evaluating my own relation to Japan's literary heritage. For Japanese who have witnessed (at least intellectually) the violent attraction to and rejection of foreign cultures of many of their predecessors in the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras, and their final, often sentimental and abstract, glorification of the Japanese cultural heritage, nihon kaiki (return to Japan) still presents enormously complex intellectual as well as emotional problems.

The Stories of Ibis

The Stories of Ibis PDF Author: Hiroshi Yamamoto
Publisher: VIZ Media LLC
ISBN: 1421540843
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In a world where humans are a minority and androids have created their own civilization, a wandering storyteller meets the beautiful android Ibis. She tells him seven stories of human/android interaction in order to reveal the secret behind humanity's fall. The tales Ibis tells are science fiction stories about the events surrounding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At a glance, these stories do not appear to have any sort of connection, but what is the true meaning behind them? What are Ibis's real intentions? -- VIZ Media

Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams

Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams PDF Author: Christopher Bolton
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452913463
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Since the end of the Second World War—and particularly over the last decade—Japanese science fiction has strongly influenced global popular culture. Unlike American and British science fiction, its most popular examples have been visual—from Gojira (Godzilla) and Astro Boy in the 1950s and 1960s to the anime masterpieces Akira and Ghost in the Shell of the 1980s and 1990s—while little attention has been paid to a vibrant tradition of prose science fiction in Japan. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams remedies this neglect with a rich exploration of the genre that connects prose science fiction to contemporary anime. Bringing together Western scholars and leading Japanese critics, this groundbreaking work traces the beginnings, evolution, and future direction of science fiction in Japan, its major schools and authors, cultural origins and relationship to its Western counterparts, the role of the genre in the formation of Japan’s national and political identity, and its unique fan culture. Covering a remarkable range of texts—from the 1930s fantastic detective fiction of Yumeno Kyûsaku to the cross-culturally produced and marketed film and video game franchise Final Fantasy—this book firmly establishes Japanese science fiction as a vital and exciting genre. Contributors: Hiroki Azuma; Hiroko Chiba, DePauw U; Naoki Chiba; William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College; Mari Kotani; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, Stanford U; Susan Napier, Tufts U; Sharalyn Orbaugh, U of British Columbia; Tamaki Saitô; Thomas Schnellbächer, Berlin Free U. Christopher Bolton is assistant professor of Japanese at Williams College. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. is professor of English at DePauw University. Takayuki Tatsumi is professor of English at Keio University.

The Cat and The City

The Cat and The City PDF Author: Nick Bradley
Publisher: Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1786499908
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick 'Ingenious ... touching, surprising and sometimes heartbreaking.' Guardian 'If you're itching to read a new novel by David Mitchell ... try this.' The Times _______________ In Tokyo - one of the world's largest megacities - a stray cat is wending her way through the back alleys. And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways. But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers - from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave his house, to a convenience store worker searching for love. The cat orbits Tokyo's denizens, drawing them ever closer. 'Masterfully weaves together seemingly disparate threads to conjure up a vivid tapestry of Tokyo; its glory, its shame, its characters, and a calico cat.' David Peace, author of THE TOKYO TRILOGY One of the Independent's best debuts