Lurid depictions of sex and impotence, themes of emperor worship and violence, the use of realism and myth - these characterize the fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Napier discovers similarities as well as dissimilarities in the work of two writers of radically different political orientations. Napier places Yukio's and Kenzaburo's fiction in the context of postwar Japanese political and social realities and, in a new preface for the paperback edition, reflects on each writer's position in the tradition of Japanese literature.

For the writers and poets of early-20th-century Japan, literary modernism was a crisis of perception before it was a crisis of representation. When Our Eyes No Longer See portrays an extraordinary moment in the history of this perceptual crisis and in Japanese literature during the 1920s and 1930s.

The breadth and diversity of this Renaissance man?s oeuvre reveals untiring attention to and interest in the culture, art, faces, society, and politics of this country. With over 70,000 pictures taken between the 1920s and 1980s, Domon Ken is considered the supreme master of Japanese photography as well as the main exponent of realism as the only approach possible. Over the years he honed is craft, shifting from propaganda photography during the war to photography as a life?s mission, in search of his own Japan: a fascinating and silent Japan of ancient temples, Buddhist sculptures, puppet theaters (where he took refuge during the war); the seductive and expressive faces of celebrities alongside the modest ones of street urchins; the poorest Japan of mining villages; and finally his most disturbing and modern work, portraying Hiroshima and its unhealed wounds. 0 0Rosella Menegazzo is a professor of East Asian Art History at the University of Milan. Takeshi Fujimori is the artistic director of Ken Domon Museum of Photography, Sakata, Japan. 00Exhibition: Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome, Italy (27.05-18.09.2016).

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.

American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan: From Perry to Obama is an historical survey of how Americans have viewed Japan during the past 160 years. It encompasses the diplomatic, political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the relationship, with an emphasis on changing American images, myths, and stereotypes of Japan and the Japanese. It begins with the American “opening” of Japan in the 1850s and 1860s. Subsequent chapters explore American attitudes toward Japan during the Gilded Age, the early 1900s, the 1920s, the 1930s, and the Pacific War. The second part of the book, organized round the theme of the postwar Japanese-American partnership, covers the Occupation, the 1960s, the troubled 1970s and1980s, and the post-Cold War decades down to the Obama presidency. The conclusion offers some predictions about how Americans are likely to view Japan in the future.

Using the Euro-American theoretical framework of postmodernism, feminism and post-colonialism, this book analyses the fictional and critical work of four contemporary Japanese writers; Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin. In addition the author reconsiders this Euro-American theory by looking back on it from the perspective of Japanese literary work. Presenting outstanding analysis of Japanese intellectuals and writers who have received little attention in the West, the book also includes an extensive and comprehensive bibliography making it essential reading for those studying Japanese literature, Japanese studies and Japanese thinkers.