The triumphs and tragedies of Guma, a poor sailor, and Livia, the woman he loves, mirror the mysteries, passions, and dreams of life itself, in a story in Bahia, Brazil in the early 1930s

Kanadehon Chushingura has been one of the most popular bunraku and kabuki plays. This fascinating study explores the full spectrum of ukiyo-e (floating world) representations of the Chushingura story. Essential reading for all students of Japanese theatre, the history of Japanese art and the social history of Japan.

First published in 2003. Built in 1628 at the Koto-in temple in the precincts of Daitoku-ji monastery in Kyoto, the Shoko-ken is a late medieval daime sukiya Japanese tea-house. It is attributed to Hosokawa Tadaoki, also known as Hosokawa Sansai, an aristocrat and daimyo military leader, and a disciple and friend of Sen no Riky?. This work is an extremely thorough look at one of the few remaining tea-houses of the Momoyama era tea-masters who studied with Sen no Rikyu. The English language sources on Hosokawa Sansai and his tea-houses have been exhaustively researched. Many facts and minute observations have been brought together to give even the reader unfamiliar with Tea a sense of the presence which the tea-house still manifests.

This volume of twelve essays with useful bibliographies, in the fields of history, art, religion, literature, anthropology, political science, and law, documents the history of United States scholarship on Japan since 1945.

The Zen Buddhist monastery Daitokuji in Kyoto has long been revered as a cloistered meditation centre, a repository of art treasures, and a wellspring of the "Zen aesthetic." Gregory Levine's Daitokuji unsettles these conventional notions with groundbreaking inquiry into the significant and surprising visual and social identities of sculpture, painting, and calligraphy associated with this fourteenth-century monastery and its enduring monastic and lay communities. The book begins with a study of Zen portraiture at Daitokuji that reveals the precariousness of portrait likeness; the face that gazes out from an abbot's painting or statue may not be who we expect it to be or submit quietly to interpretation. By tracing the life of Daitokuji's famed statue of the chanoyu patriarch Sen no Riky-u (1522-91), which was all but destroyed by the ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98) but survived in Rash-omon-like narratives and reconstituted sculptural forms, Levine throws light upon the contested status of images and their mytho-poetic potential. Levine then draws from the seventeenth-century journal of K-ogetsu S-ogan, Bokuseki no utsushi, to explore practices of calligraphy connoisseurship at Daitokuji and the pivotal role played by the monastery's abbots within Kyoto art circles. The book's final section explores Daitokuji's annual airings of temple treasures not merely as a practice geared toward preservation but also as a space in which different communities vie for authority over the artistic past. An epilogue follows the peripatetic journey of the monastery's scrolls of the 500 Luohan from China to Japan, to exhibition and partial sale in the West, and back to Daitokuji. Illuminating canonical and heretofore ignored works and mining a trove of documents, diaries, and modern writings, Levine argues for the plurality of Daitokuji's visual arts and the breadth of social and ritual circumstances of art making and viewing within the monastery. This diversity encourages reconsideration of stereotyped notions of "Zen art" and offers specialists and general readers alike opportunity to explore the fertile and sometimes volatile nexus of the visual arts and religious sites in Japan.

In this meticulous and lucid study, Andrew Watsky keenly illustrates how private belief and political ambition influenced artsitic production at the intersection of institutional Buddhism and Shinto during this tumultuous period of rapid and radical political, social, and aesthetic changes. He offers substantial conclusions not only about the specific site, but also, more broadly, about the nature of art production in Japan and how perceptions of the sacred shaped the concerns and actions of the secular rulers ... Watsky has had unique access to the island, and many of the images included here have not previously been published. -- Book Jacket.