In many ways, divorce is a quintessentially personal decision—the choice to leave a marriage that causes harm or feels unfulfilling to the two people involved. But anyone who has gone through a divorce knows the additional public dimensions of breaking up, from intense shame and societal criticism to friends’ and relatives’ unsolicited advice. In Intimate Disconnections, Allison Alexy tells the fascinating story of the changing norms surrounding divorce in Japan in the early 2000s, when sudden demographic and social changes made it a newly visible and viable option. Not only will one of three Japanese marriages today end in divorce, but divorces are suddenly much more likely to be initiated by women who cite new standards for intimacy as their motivation. As people across Japan now consider divorcing their spouses, or work to avoid separation, they face complicated questions about the risks and possibilities marriage brings: How can couples be intimate without becoming suffocatingly close? How should they build loving relationships when older models are no longer feasible? What do you do, both legally and socially, when you just can’t take it anymore? Relating the intensely personal stories from people experiencing different stages of divorce, Alexy provides a rich ethnography of Japan while also speaking more broadly to contemporary visions of love and marriage during an era in which neoliberal values are prompting wide-ranging transformations in homes across the globe.

Romance and sexual intimacy are among lifes highest joys. How we handle our sexuality is an ultimate challenge, particularly in todays sexualised global culture. Rob Yule looks at a fascinating selection of romantic relationships from throughout Christian history, from Augustine, Abelard and Helose, and the Luthers to Billy and Ruth Graham and Pope Saint John Paul II. Illustrating how challenging and far-from-straightforward the relationship of men and women is in real life, he draws many insights for relationships and marriage today. A Terrifying Grace explores the romantic relationships of leading Christians throughout history and how they handled sex and marriage. What were their relationships and marriages like? What did they believe or teach about sexuality and marriage? Did their marriages or celibate lives live up to their professed beliefs? How did they handle the joys, pains, temptations, and responsibilities of their intimate relationships, alongside their public life and witness? Even great Christians have struggled to handle their intimate relationships. We can learn much from them how to live with integrity in todays hypersexualised culture.

Get the Summary of Olivia Laing's The Lonely City in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. "The Lonely City" by Olivia Laing is a profound exploration of loneliness in urban environments, particularly New York City. Laing, feeling isolated after a breakup, examines her own loneliness alongside the experiences of artists like Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz. She finds resonance in Hopper's paintings, which articulate the solitary urban experience, and delves into Warhol's life, revealing his struggles with speech and identity despite his social persona...

In East Asia’s largest cities, hundreds of thousands of women remain single into middle age and beyond, giving rise to a demographic transformation with profound implications for their societies. Labeled in the media as “loser dogs” and “parasites” in Japan and “leftover women” in mainland China and Hong Kong, single women in East Asia are criticized for being choosy, selfish, and overly independent. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with more than a hundred single women in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, Making Our Own Destiny is the first study to comprehensively compare the views and experiences of single women living in these three great cities—cities that stand at the forefront of the region’s movement toward later marriage and rising singlehood. This well-researched book explores how single women attempt to take advantage of unprecedented opportunities for success in education and work while navigating marriage and family expectations. Unlike their counterparts in Europe and North America, many do not have romantic partners and most do not have children. What do these women want? How do they see themselves and their place in society? What are their values, goals, and dreams? As they work to balance opportunities with expectations, single women in urban East Asia find themselves deeply embedded in the caregiving systems of their societies. In Shanghai, author Lynne Nakano finds single women rushing to marry to enter intergenerational relationships of care. In Hong Kong, they consider the risks of marriage as they tend to the needs of natal and extended families. In Tokyo, many single women hope to marry to have children while others find a place for themselves in their families as elder caregivers. Nakano’s intimate portrayals not only expose meticulously planned family strategies gone awry, engagements broken, and careers abandoned, but also highlight the experiences of women embracing the joys of remaining single. Hers is a fascinating study of modern women finding meaning in their lives while offering an insightful glimpse into the future of urban families in an age of low fertility and long transitions into adulthood.

This Companion is a comprehensive examination of the varied ways in which gender issues manifest throughout culture in Japan, using a range of international perspectives to examine private and public constructions of identity, as well as gender- and sexuality-inflected cultural production. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture features both new work and updated accounts of classic scholarship, providing a go-to reference work for contemporary scholarship on gender in Japanese culture. The volume is interdisciplinary in scope, with chapters drawing from a range of perspectives, fields, and disciplines, including anthropology, art history, history, law, linguistics, literature, media and cultural studies, politics, and sociology. This reflects the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the dual focal points of this volume—gender and culture—and the ways in which these themes infuse a range of disciplines and subfields. In this volume, Jennifer Coates, Lucy Fraser, and Mark Pendleton have brought together an essential guide to experiences of gender in Japanese culture today—perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in Japan, culture, gender studies, and beyond.

Japan has often been portrayed as a mysterious, sexless, troubled land. Birth rates and marriage rates have been decreasing for decades, and national surveys show that Japanese people are simply having less sex overall. But Japan is not so different from anywhere else—it’s simply on the leading edge of worldwide demographic shifts. Because of rigid norms around gender, marriage, childbearing, and work, and relatively strict immigration policies, Japan is also experiencing these shifts more acutely. In The Relationship People, Erika R. Alpert starts by exploring some of the factors that have contributed to later and less marriage and childbearing in Japan and elsewhere. Alpert then goes on to explore the disjuncture between what Japanese singles report as preventing them from getting married and popularly proposed solutions to this problem. Japanese singles point to economic factors, such as low income, as one of their most significant barriers to marriage. However, much of the popular discourse aimed at Japanese singles elides these economic concerns; instead, it encourages them to exert more personal effort to meet people in order to get married. These “marriage activities” (konkatsu) may take the form of signing up with a professional matchmaker, using an online dating site, or going to singles’ parties. By examining konkatsu from the perspective of matchmakers, clients, and online daters, Alpert looks at the linguistic processes of connection that underpin konkatsu and its successes—or more often, failures. Institutions of matchmaking and technological structures such as databases and online profiles give shape to the ways singles connect. As this research shows, understanding this linguistic connective tissue enables us to answer questions about what constitutes “attractive” and “marriageable” in Japan, what kind of consciousness konkatsu is supposed to instill in singles, and what role Japan’s various partner matching industries might be able to play in alleviating the country’s demographic crisis.

Introduction : disconnected people and the lonely society -- Subjectivity and empathy -- Too lonely to die alone : internet group suicide -- Connecting the disconnected : suicide websites -- Meaning in life : exploring the need to be needed among young Japanese -- Surviving 3.11 -- The anatomy of resilience -- What loneliness can teach us.