New Chronicles Of Yanagibashi And Diary Of A Journey To The West

This book features complete annotated translations of Narushima Ryuhoku's two most widely read and influential texts, both of which showcase the innovative and experimental use of Chinese-language discourse taking place in Japan during the nineteenth century. Focused on one of the capital city's celebrated geisha districts, the satirical New Chronicles of Yanagibashi serves as both a documentary record of changing customs during the tumultuous 1850s-1870s and an amusingly nuanced social critique. Banned multiple times, the work nevertheless became a favorite of the Meiji reading public. This text is paired with Diary of a Journey to the West, Ryuhoku's travelogue from his world tour of 1872 to 1873. Together, these texts show Ryuhoku in the process of becoming one of Meiji Japan s pioneering journalists and illustrate the range of ways in which Chinese discourse continued to serve as a vital medium in modernizing Japan.

In A Sense of the City, Follaco examines Nagai Kafū’s (1879-1959) urban representation, both at home and abroad, to define his position within the context of pre-war Japanese literature while touching upon crucial issues of modernity.

Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity explores the narrative formations of urbanity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within the framework of the “spatial turn,” contributors from disciplines ranging from geography and history to literary and media studies theorize narrative constructions of the city and cities, and analyze relevant examples from a variety of discourses, media, and cities. Subdivided into six sections, the book explores the interactions of city and text—as well as other media—and the conflicting narratives that arise in these interactions. Offering case studies that discuss specific aspects of the narrative construction of Berlin and London, the text also considers narratives of urban discontinuity and their theoretical implications. Ultimately, this volume captures the narratological, artistic, material, social, and performative possibilities inherent in spatial representations of the city.

The essays collected in this volume for the first time foreground the fundamental role Asian actors played in the formation of scholarly knowledge on Buddhism and the emergence of Buddhist studies as an academic discipline in Europe and Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The contributions focus on different aspects of the interchange between Japanese Buddhists and their European interlocutors ranging from the halls of Oxford to the temples of Nara. They break the mould of previous scholarship and redress the imbalances inherent in Eurocentric accounts of the construction of Buddhism as an object of professorial interest. Contributors are: Micah Auerback, Mick Deneckere, Stephan Kigensan Licha, Hans Martin Krämer, Ōmi Toshihiro, Jakub Zamorski, Suzanne Marchand, Martin Baumann, Catherine Fhima, and Roland Lardinois.

This book charts the history of Confucianism in Japan to offer new perspectives on the sociology of Confucianiam across East Asia.

In Kanbunmyaku: The Literary Sinitic Context and the Birth of Modern Japanese Language and Literature, Saito Mareshi demonstrates the centrality of kanbun and kanshi in the creation of modern literary Japanese and problematizes the modern antagonism between kanbun and Japanese.

Plucking Chrysanthemums is a critical study of the life and works of Narushima Ryūhoku (1837–1884): Confucian scholar, world traveler, pioneering journalist, and irrepressible satirist. A major figure on the nineteenth-century Japanese cultural scene, Ryūhoku wrote works that were deeply rooted in classical Sinitic literary traditions. Sinitic poetry and prose enjoyed a central and prestigious place in Japan for nearly all of its history, and the act of composing it continued to offer modern Japanese literary figures the chance to incorporate themselves into a written tradition that transcended national borders. Adopting Ryūhoku’s multifarious invocations of Six Dynasties poet Tao Yuanming as an organizing motif, Matthew Fraleigh traces the disparate ways in which Ryūhoku drew upon the Sinitic textual heritage over the course of his career. The classical figure of this famed Chinese poet and the Sinitic tradition as a whole constituted a referential repository to be shaped, shifted, and variously spun to meet the emerging circumstances of the writer as well as his expressive aims. Plucking Chrysanthemums is the first book-length study of Ryūhoku in a Western language and also one of the first Western-language monographs to examine Sinitic poetry and prose (kanshibun) composition in modern Japan.