🪶🐜 𝖩𝖺𝗉𝖺𝗇𝖾𝗌𝖾 𝖫𝗂𝗍𝖾𝗋𝖺𝗍𝗎𝗋𝖾 & 𝖯𝗌𝗒𝖼𝗁𝗈𝗅𝗈𝗀𝗂𝖼𝖺𝗅 𝖱𝖾𝖺𝗅𝗂𝗌𝗆

Ryunosuke Akutagawa blends a sense of sad inevitability with subtle irony. Reflective and often humorous, these tales reveal an enormous amount about Japanese culture, while the inner struggles of the characters always strike the universal.

"Rashomon", "Di Dalam Belukar", dan "Hidung" adalah karya-karya yang melambungkan nama Akutagawa (1892-1927) di kancah kesusasteraan Jepang modern. Bersumber dari kumpulan cerita klasik Jepang abad ke-12, Konjaku Monogatari, ketiga cerpen ini diolah dengan sangat memikat menjadi cerita yang sarat konflik batin para tokohnya. Empu perfilman Jepang, Akira Kurosawa, bahkan mengangkat, "Di Dalam Belukar" menjadi film layar lebar dengan judul "Rashomon". Buku ini menampilkan terjemahan ketiga cerpen tersebut langsung dari bahasa Jepang disertai pembahasannya. Buku ini juga memuat teks aslinya dalam bahasa Jepang. Mereka yang menaruh minat terhadap sastra Jepang, terutama mahasiswa jurusan sastra Jepang dan para sastrawan muda, patut membaca buku ini

How did a girl from the provinces, meant to do nothing more than run the family store, become a bold and daring poet whose life and work helped change the idea of love in modern Japan? Embracing the Firebird is the first book-length study in English of the early life and work of Yosano Akiko (1879-1942), the most famous post-classical woman poet of Japan. It follows Akiko, who was born into a merchant family in the port city of Sakai near Osaka, from earliest childhood to her twenties, charting the slow process of development before the seemingly sudden metamorphosis. Akiko's later poetry has now begun to win long-overdue recognition, but in terms of literary history the impact of Midaregami ( Tangled Hair, 1901), her first book, still overshadows everything else she wrote, for it brought individualism to traditional tanka poetry with a tempestuous force and passion found in no other work of the period. Embracing the Firebird traces Akiko's emotional and artistic development up to the publication of this seminal work, which became a classic of modern Japanese poetry and marked the starting point of Akiko's forty-year-long career as a writer. It then examines Tangled Hair itself, the characteristics that make it a unified work of art, and its originality. The study throughout includes Janine Beichman's elegant translations of poems by Yosano Akiko (both those included in Tangled Hair and those not), as well as poems by contemporaries such as Yosano Tekkan, Yamakawa Tomiko, and others.

Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) has long been recognized as one of the most important literary figures of prewar Japan. Hitherto she has been renowned principally for the passion of her early poetry and for her contributions to twentieth-century debates about women. This emphasis obscures a major part of her career, which was devoted to work on the Japanese classics and, in particular, the great Heian-period text The Tale of Genji. Akiko herself felt that Genji was the bedrock upon which her entire literary career was built, and her bibliography shows a steadily increasing amount of time devoted to projects related to the tale. This study traces for the first time the full range of Akiko's involvement with The Tale of Genji. Genji provided Akiko with her conception of herself as a writer and inspired many of her most significant literary projects. She, in turn, refurbished the tale as a modern novel, pioneered some of the most promising avenues of modern academic research on Genji, and, to a great extent, gave the text the prominence it now enjoys as a translated classic. Through her work Genji became, in fact as well as in name, an exemplum of that most modern of literary genres, the novel. In delineating this important aspect of Akiko's life and her bibliography, this study aims to show that facile descriptions of Akiko as a "poetess of passion" or "new woman" will no longer suffice.

On September 13, 1912, the day of Emperor Meiji’s funeral, General Nogi Maresuke committed ritual suicide by seppuku (disembowelment). It was an act of delayed atonement that paid a debt of honor incurred thirty-five years earlier. The revered military hero’s wife joined in his act of junshi ("following one’s lord into death"). The violence of their double suicide shocked the nation. What had impelled the general and his wife, on the threshold of a new era, to resort so drastically, so dramatically, to this forbidden, anachronistic practice? The nation was divided. There were those who saw the suicides as a heroic affirmation of the samurai code; others found them a cause for embarrassment, a sign that Japan had not yet crossed the cultural line separating tradition from modernity. While acknowledging the nation’s sharply divided reaction to the Nogis’ junshi as a useful indicator of the event’s seismic impact on Japanese culture, Doris G. Bargen in the first half of her book demonstrates that the deeper significance of Nogi’s action must be sought in his personal history, enmeshed as it was in the tumultuous politics of the Meiji period. Suicidal Honor traces Nogi’s military career (and personal travail) through the armed struggles of the collapsing shôgunate and through the two wars of imperial conquest during which Nogi played a significant role: the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). It also probes beneath the political to explore the religious origins of ritual self-sacrifice in cultures as different as ancient Rome and today’s Nigeria. Seen in this context, Nogi’s death was homage to the divine emperor. But what was the significance of Nogi’s waiting thirty-five years before he offered himself as a human sacrifice to a dead rather than living deity? To answer this question, Bargen delves deeply and with great insight into the story of Nogi’s conflicted career as a military hero who longed to be a peaceful man of letters. In the second half of Suicidal Honor Bargen turns to the extraordinary influence of the Nogis’ deaths on two of Japan’s greatest writers, Mori Ôgai and Natsume Sôseki. Ôgai’s historical fiction, written in the immediate aftermath of his friend’s junshi, is a profound meditation on the significance of ritual suicide in a time of historical transition. Stories such as "The Sakai Incident" ("Sakai jiken") appear in a new light and with greatly enhanced resonance in Bargen’s interpretation. In Sôseki’s masterpiece, Kokoro, Sensei, the protagonist, refers to the emperor’s death and his general’s junshi before taking his own life. Scholars routinely mention these references, but Bargen demonstrates convincingly the uncanny ways in which Sôseki’s agonized response to Nogi’s suicide structures the entire novel. By exploring the historical and literary legacies of Nogi, Ôgai, and Sôseki from an interdisciplinary perspective, Suicidal Honor illuminates Japan’s prolonged and painful transition from the idealized heroic world of samurai culture to the mundane anxieties of modernity. It is a study that will fascinate specialists in the fields of Japanese literature, history, and religion, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of Japan’s warrior culture.

The fiction of Mori Ogai, written after the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912, secured his promiment place in modern Japanese literature. This collection of stories, set in the Tokugawa Period, provide a means for Ogai to deal with contemporary moral and philosophical values and themes.

Born in 1907, Nakahara Chuya was one of the most gifted and colourful of Japan’s early modern poets. A bohemian romantic, his death at the early age of thirty, coupled with the delicacy of his imagery, have led to him being compared to the greatest of French symbolist poets. Since the Second World War Nakahara’s stature has risen, and his poetry is now ranked among the finest Japanese verse of the 20th century. Influenced by both Symbolism and Dada, he created lyrics renowned for their songlike eloquence, their personal imagery and their poignant charm. This selection of poems from throughout Nakahara’s creative life includes collected and uncollected work and draws on recent scholarship to give a full account of this extraordinary figure.

Dazai Osamu (1909-1948) is one of Japan's most famous literary suicides, known as the earliest postwar manifestation of the genuinely alienated writer in Japan. In this first deconstructive reading of a modern Japanese novelist, Alan Wolfe draws on contemporary Western literary and cultural theories and on a knowledge of Dazai's work in the context of Japanese literary history to provide a fresh view of major texts by this important literary figure. In the process, Wolfe revises Japanese as well as Western scholarship on Dazai and discovers new connections among suicide, autobiography, alienation, and modernization. As shown here, Dazai's writings resist narrative and historical closure; while he may be said to serve the Japanese literary establishment as both romantic decadent and representative scapegoat, his texts reveal a deconstructive edge through which his posthumous status as a monument of negativity is already perceived and undone. Wolfe maintains that cultural modernization pits a Western concept of the individual as realized self and coherent subject against an Eastern absent self—and that a felt need to overcome this tension inspires the autobiographical fiction so prevalent in Japanese novels. Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan shows that Dazai's texts also resist readings that would resolve the gaps (East/West, self/other, modern/premodern) still prevalent in Japanese intellectual life. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Best-known for his novels No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, Dazai was also an acclaimed writer of short stories, experimenting with a wide variety of styles and bringing to each work a sophisticated sense of humor, a broad empathy for the human condition and a tremendous literary talent. The twenty stories in this collection include: • Memories — An autobiographical tale in which Dazai relates episodes from his own childhood and adolescence, showing his relationship with his family and his tendency towards introspection and self-dramatization • On the Question of Apparel — A comic tour-de-force in which Dazai examines the hold that fashion has over him and how it relates to his own pathetic self-image • A Poor Man's Got His Pride — A retelling of a story by 18th-century master of burlesque fiction Ihara Saikaku, about a fallen samurai who lives in poverty • The Sound of Hammering — A love story set against the backdrop of the rebuilding of Tokyo after the city was totally destroyed during World War Two • And sixteen other stories! By turns hilarious, ironic, introspective, mystical and sarcastic, these stories present a fully rounded portrait of a talented writer who tried several times to take his own life and ultimately succeeded. An introduction by translator James O'Brien gives the background to Dazai's life and shows how the stories in this book, whether autobiographical or fictional, contribute to an understanding of one of Japan's greatest writers.

'What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.' Autobiographical stories from one of Japan's masters of modernist story-telling. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) Akutagawa's Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories is also available in Penguin Classics.

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. A magnificent blending of the music, the mood, and the ethos that was the sixties with the story of one college student's romantic coming of age, Norwegian Wood brilliantly recaptures a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.

Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle—yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot\-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild\-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television\-fee collector. A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self\-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s — 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II. In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen\-year\-old\-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria. Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind\-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.

Hailed by The New Yorker as "rich in understanding and insight," Kokoro—"the heart of things"—is the work of one of Japan's most popular authors. This thought-provoking trilogy of stories explores the very essence of loneliness and stands as a stirring introduction to modern Japanese literature.

In Osaka in the years immediately before World War II, four aristocratic women try to preserve a way of life that is vanishing. As told by Junichiro Tanizaki, the story of the Makioka sisters forms what is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century, a poignant yet unsparing portrait of a family–and an entire society–sliding into the abyss of modernity. Tsuruko, the eldest sister, clings obstinately to the prestige of her family name even as her husband prepares to move their household to Tokyo, where that name means nothing. Sachiko compromises valiantly to secure the future of her younger sisters. The unmarried Yukiko is a hostage to her family’s exacting standards, while the spirited Taeko rebels by flinging herself into scandalous romantic alliances. Filled with vignettes of upper-class Japanese life and capturing both the decorum and the heartache of its protagonist, The Makioka Sisters is a classic of international literature.