This critically acclaimed autobiography was an instant bestseller in Japan, where it has gone through more than forty printings since its first publication. Cultural critic, literary historian, novelist, poet, and physician, Kato Shuichi reconstructs his dramatic spiritual and intellectual journey from the militarist era of prewar Japan to the dynamic postwar landscapes of Japan and Europe. This fluid translation of A Sheep's Song captures Kato's unique voice and brings his insightful interpretation of modern Japan and its tumultuous relations with the outside world to English-speaking readers for the first time. Kato describes his youthful interest in the natural sciences as well as in Japanese and Western literatures—from the Man'yoshu to Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Baudelaire, Valéry, and Proust. Turning to the rise of Japanese fascism in the late 1930s, he recalls his rebellion against the jingoistic political atmosphere of the time. The chapters on the war and its aftermath include experiences of Hiroshima shortly after the bombing and the often tragicomic encounters between the defeated Japanese nation and the American Occupation forces. Throughout, memories of his wide-ranging literary career and broad experiences in Europe as a student, traveler, and cultural observer are punctuated by his unique perspectives on the relation between imagination, art, and politics. A postscript written especially for the English-language edition discusses the Vietnam War, the subsequent transformation of Japan, the cultures and societies of Europe, the United States, and China, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The stunning biographical portraits in Modern Girls, Shining Stars, the Skies of Tokyo, some adapted from essays that first appeared in The New Yorker, explore the lives of five women who did their best to stand up and cause more trouble than was considered proper in Japanese society. Their lives stretch across a century and a half of explosive cultural and political transformations in Japan. These five artists-two actresses, two writers, and a painter-were noted for their talents, their beauty, and their love affairs rather than for any association with politics. But through the fearlessness of their art and their private lives, they influenced the attitudes of their times and challenged the status quo. Phyllis Birnbaum presents her subjects from various perspectives, allowing them to shine forth in all of their contradictory brilliance: generous and petulant, daring and timid, prudent and foolish. There is Matsui Sumako, the actress who introduced Ibsen's Nora and Wilde's Salome to Japanese audiences but is best remembered for her ambition, obstreperous temperament and turbulent love life. We also meet Takamura Chieko, a promising but ultimately disappointed modernist painter whose descent into mental illness was immortalized in poetry by a husband who may well have been the source of her troubles. In a startling act of rebellion, the sensitive, aristocratic poet Yanagiwara Byakuren left her crude and powerful husband, eloped with her revolutionary lover, and published her request for a divorce in the newspapers. Uno Chiyo was a popular novelist who preferred to be remembered for the romantic wars she fought. Willful, shrewd, and ambitious, Uno struggled for sexual liberation and literary merit. Birnbaum concludes by exploring the life and career of Takamine Hideko, a Japanese film star who portrayed wholesome working-class heroines in hundreds of films, working with such directors as Naruse, Kinoshita, Ozu, and Kurosawa. Angry about a childhood spent working to provide for greedy relatives, Takamine nevertheless made peace with her troubled past and was rewarded for years of hard work with a brilliant career. Drawing on fictional accounts, interviews, memoirs, newspaper reports, and the creative works of her subjects, Birnbaum has created vivid, seamless narrative portraits of these five remarkable women.

The Facts On File Companion to World Poetry : 1900 to the Present is a comprehensive introduction to 20th and 21st-century world poets and their most famous, most distinctive, and most influential poems.

This book brings applied linguistics and translation studies together through an analysis of literary texts in Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Korean and their translations. It examines the traces of translanguaging in translated texts with special focus on the strategic use of scripts, morphemes, words, names, onomatopoeias, metaphors, puns and other contextualized linguistic elements. As a result, the author draws attention to the long-term, often invisible contributions of translanguaging performed by translators to the development of languages and society. The analysis sheds light on the problems caused by monolingualizing forces in translation, teaching and communicative contexts in modern societies, as well as bringing a new dimension to the burgeoning field of translanguaging studies.

A Stanford University Press classic.

Takamura Kotaro (1883-1956) drew on his studies in New York, London, and Paris to lay the foundations in Japan for Western-style Japanese sculpture through his intricate wood carvings and powerful bronzes. But Takamura also composed poems infused with startling energy, directness, and narrative clarity. Among the first to use the vernacular masterfully in verse, he has long been recognized as one of Japan's premier modern poets. Takamura thus stood in the confluence of two artistic currents, both shaping and being shaped by them. His personal experiences, from exultation to tragedy, found expression through this dynamic. Hiroaki Sato now captures a lucid picture of Takamura's eloquent struggle with art and with life. Originally published in 1980 as Chieko and Other Poems, this expanded volume includes a new introduction and a new selection of Takamura's essays on art and other subjects. The poetry included here is divided into three parts: "The Journey" represents a chronology of the poet's life; "Chieko" is a selection of poems about Takamura's wife which describes his devotion to her for more than thirty years through courtship and marriage, during her illness and insanity, and continuing after her death; and "A Brief History of Imbecility" is a sequence of twenty autobiographical poems composed in 1947. The essays, appearing in English for the first time, offer a more complete understanding of Takamura's relationship to art, his complex experience of Paris, and his views on beauty and creativity. Included here are "The Latter Half of Chieko's Life," a moving prose complement to the Chieko poems, and "A Last Glance at the Third Ministry of Education Art Exhibition," a scathing review of the modern art world, the first of its kind in Japan.