Mei Yumi S Postwar Japanese Literature

The postwar Japanese strived, unsteadily as if about to fall, to live everyday lives and to restore Japan, while suffering from the survivor's guilt. The early postwar novels of Hayashi Fumiko. Three novels of Hayashi Fumiko translated here are related to the early postwar period in Japan. Late Chrysanthemum - Ban'Giku "Late Chrysanthemum" is an ex-geisha's one night story after the war. The main character Kin had a strong will to survive. An ex-geisha had a visitor, who was her ex-lover sometime in the prewar years and desperately needed money. He intrigued to get money from his ex., even by slaughter. How did the ex-geisha rid out of the crisis? Her quick wit worked, which suggests us how to manage a risk in a daily life. In November 1948, 23 Showa, "Late Chrysanthemum" appeared in an extra issue of a literary magazine, the Bungei'Shunju. This is the most important work of Hayashi Fumiko, which is praised for its highly qualified perfection and elaborate description. Downtown - Shita'machi "Downtown" is a two week story of a female peddler and an ex-soldier after the war. Their relationship finished all of sudden. "Downtown" appeared in April 1949, 24 Showa in an extra issue of a literary magazine, Shosetsu'Shincho. The literary magazine has been published monthly since September 1947 from The Shinchosha Publishing Co, Ltd. which was founded in 1896. Floating clouds - Uki'gumo "Floating Clouds" is mainly a five year story. The storyline, however, extends from 1939 in Japan, during the years since 1943 in French Indochina, and the postwar period in 1945 to 1949 in Japan. The author describes changes in people's feelings after the war, while following the trajectories of men and women before and after the war. This novel can be seen as Hayashi Fumiko's compilation. "Floating clouds" is compiled in a book and published in April 1951, 26 Showa, which is considered to be the last novel of Hayashi Fumiko. The author died suddenly of heart attack at home at about 11:00 pm, June 28 in 1951, 26 Showa, at the age of 48. Enjoy!

The amazing system of licensed pleasure palaces in Yoshiwara is described precisely. Physical and mental changes of children were conspicuous and understandable to grownups but sorrowful enigmas for the children themselves. Japan's literary masters and critics praised this novel as Ichiyo's masterpiece. Enjoy! The storyline of the novel, 'Turbid Bay,' runs in July in summer in touch with a downright stalker-murderer, the victim, and their background stories. A bitter remorse left behind. A 20-year-old stylish seamstress seemingly came from a good family. Once she said, “My heart burns with anger very often.” A 16-year-old employee of an umbrella shop was a foundling. One day, he wondered, “Whether I was born from a crotch of a tree.” Their relationship was over, all too soon. Okyo decided to live a better life, as a concubine. Japanese readers are moved by Kichizo's final remark. “Okyo'san, please take your hands off my shoulder.” The wealthy madam, beautiful, innocent, and lonesome, was in the center of turbulence of jealousy and infidelity. When she realized that she was blocked in every direction, everything had been arranged carefully against her. Who did it first? Amazing stories so far untold are shown with a map of Yoshiwara to overseas readers. In Appendix 1. Yoshiwara of the Edo period is described. A fantastic world of Japanese culture and tradition was a collaboration of men as wealthy customers and women as the oiran and yujo in licensed pleasure palaces. In Appendix 2, how to make the waka poetry is talked about. Enjoy! It would be fun just to read the Japanese vocabularies and meanings. The portrait of Higuchi Ichiyo has appeared as the icon of the Japanese 5,000 yen banknote since the autumn of 2004.

Yoshiya Nobuko, born on Januay 12, 29 Meiji, 1896, in Nīgata and died on July 11, 48 Shōwa, 1973, in Kamakura at the age of 78, is a Japanese female novelist active from the 1920s to the early 1970s. She, in her lesbian sexual orientation and from her experience of the same-sex relationship with Monma Chiyo for over 50 years, depicted schoolgirls' friendship, which was not identical with but emotionally very close to the same-sex orientation. In 14 Taishō, 1925, she began the magazine entitled as "Kuro'Shōbi (Black Rose)" although she discontinued it in eight months. Girl subscribers of her magazine and girl fans of her novels dreamed of the modest, fair, and graceful life style and girls' friendship as written in her novels. "FORGET ME NOT" was serialized in the girls' magazine, "Shōjo'no Tomo" which literally means girls' friend, in issues from April to December in 7 Shōwa, 1932. While reading this novel, you will clearly see what the Japanese schoolgirls looked like in the early 1930s, and also the human tradition in a household and in the society at that time, along with the ideal male personalities for the author. Japanese schoolgirls' friendship and mutual confidence survived WW II. There still something traditional remains in their innermost feelings. Enjoy !

In the wake of the disaster of 1945—as Japan was forced to remake itself from “empire” to “nation” in the face of an uncertain global situation—literature and literary criticism emerged as highly contested sites. Today, this remarkable period holds rich potential for opening new dialogue between scholars in Japan and North America as we rethink the historical and contemporary significance of such ongoing questions as the meaning of the American occupation both inside and outside of Japan, the shifting semiotics of “literature” and “politics,” and the origins of what would become crucial ideological weapons of the cultural Cold War. The volume consists of three interrelated sections: “Foregrounding the Cold War,” “Structures of Concealment: ‘Cultural Anxieties,’” and “Continuity and Discontinuity: Subjective Rupture and Dislocation.” One way or another, the essays address the process through which new “Japan” was created in the postwar present, which signified an attempt to criticize and reevaluate the past. Examining postwar discourse from various angles, the essays highlight the manner in which anxieties of the future were projected onto the construction of the past, which manifest in varying disavowals and structures of concealment.

A pioneering study of German and Japanese postwar fiction, providing a broad cultural basis for understanding a half-century of responses to World War II from within the two societies.

Yasuoka Shōtarō (1920–2013) was perfectly situated to become Japan's premier chronicler of the Shōwa period (1926–89). Over fifty years as a writer, Yasuoka produced stories, novels, plays, and essays, as well as monumental histories that connected his own life to those of his ancestors. He was also the only major Japanese writer to live in the American South during the Civil Rights Movement, when he spent most of an academic year at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In 1977, he translated Alex Haley's Roots into Japanese. For a long period, Yasuoka was at the center of the Japanese literary establishment, serving on prize committees and winning the major literary prizes of the era: the Akutagawa, the Noma, the Yomiuri, and the Kawabata. But what makes Yasuoka fascinating as a writer is the way that he consciously, deliberately resisted accepted narratives of modern Japanese history through his approach to personal and collective memory. In Enduring Postwar, the first literary and biographical study of Yasuoka in English, Kendall Heitzman explores the element of memory in Yasuoka's work in the context of his life and evolving understanding of postwar Japan.

In The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought, Dennitza Gabrakova discusses how the Island imagery shapes a critical understanding of Japan on multiple intersections of trauma and sovereignty in texts from the 1960s onwards.

Hailed by the noted critic Karatani Kojin as a more important and lasting writer than Mishima, Shimao Toshio (1917-1986) remains almost unknown in the West. Several of his short stories have appeared in English translation, yet it is only now, with the publication of Philip Gabriel's comprehensive and searching study, that Shimao's work is being introduced to the worldwide audience it deserves. Mad Wives and Island Dreams not only is a thorough assessment of the literary legacy of a highly original and influential writer, but also represents a significant contribution to the consideration of much broader issues relating to the emergence and nature of the postwar Japanese sense of identity. Shimao's fiction covers a wide range of topics: the war and its aftermath, the unconscious, the nuclear family, madness, the position of women, the culture of Japan's southern islands. Shimao's experiences as a survivor of a "kamikaze" unit underscore much of his literature and resulted in a series of compelling short stories unique in modern fiction. Many of these early, critically acclaimed works, including the classic "Everyday Life in a Dream," are based on the narrative logic of the unconscious. Mad Wives and Island Dreams contextualizes these "dream stories" as a literary expression of wartime trauma and argues that Shimao's powerful narration of guilt and victimization challenges standard readings of Japanese war literature. Shimao's most popular works are the byosaimono (literally "stories of a sick wife"), which chronicle the real-life crisis of his wife's madness in the mid-1950s. Among these is the writer's best-known work, the 1977 novel Shi no toge (The sting of death), widely recognized as one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature. The novel further explores Shimao's "literature of the victimizer" and wartime experience while revealing a feminist perspective that explores links between the suppressed aspirations of women and madness. Perhaps, most importantly, just as the novel examines the relationship between the wife, Miho, and her southern island roots, Shi no toge parallels Shimao's growing concern over the culture of marginalized regions and notions of cultural diversity-a concern that would eventually result in the Yaponesia essays. In Mad Wives and Island Dreams, Gabriel succeeds in linking all of the seemingly disparate strands within Shimao's oeuvre--the war stories, the byosaimono, the dream stories, the Yaponesia writings-categories all too often discussed in isolation. He shows convincingly that together they represent a consistent and concerted attempt to depict the existence of "the Other," the significant periphery of a less than homogenous whole. This volume will prove fascinating and important reading for those interested in questions of cultural identity and marginalization as well as Japanese literature and culture.