In Tokyo Fragments, five of Japan's most popular contemporary writers of fiction present their vision of life in different quarters of Japan's capital. Spend a day with Ryota and Hiroshi on the mean streets of Shinjuku, spying on visitors to the local love hotel and sniffing glue in station toilets. Eavesdrop on the regulars at a bar in the old town as they fantasize about a fellow-customer who claims to work in the insurance business - but may be more experienced at taking life than insuring it. Join Eriko as she hunts for Mr. Right in trendy western Tokyo. Can you judge men by the same standards you apply to consumer goods? Maybe you can, but you'd better watch out for counterfeits!

This groundbreaking book examines how the notion of “the object” was transformed in Japanese experimental art during a time of rapid social, economic, and environmental change. Reviving the legacies of the historical avant-garde, Japanese artists and intellectuals of the 1960s formulated an aesthetics of disaffection through which they sought to address the stalemate of political and aesthetic representation. Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz draws from psychoanalytic theories of melancholia to examine the implications of such an approach, tracing a genealogy of disaffection within modernist discourse. By examining the discursive practices of artists working across a wide range of media, and through a close analysis of artwork, philosophical debates, artist theories, and critical accounts, Adriasola Muñoz shows how negativity became an efficacious means of addressing politics as a source for the creative act of undoing. In examining ideas of the object advanced by artists and intellectuals both in writing and as part of their artwork, this book brings discussions in critical art history to bear on the study of art in Japan. It will be of interest to art historians specializing in modernism, the international avant-garde, Japanese art, and the history of photography.

Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and provocations for change. In Fragments of the City, Colin McFarlane examines such fragments, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? For those living on the economic margins, the city is often experienced as a set of fragments. Much of what low-income residents deal with on a daily basis is fragments of stuff, made and remade with and through urban density, social infrastructure, and political practice. In this book, McFarlane explores infrastructure in Mumbai, Kampala, and Cape Town; artistic montages in Los Angeles and Dakar; refugee struggles in Berlin; and the repurposing of fragments in Hong Kong and New York. Fragments surface as material things, as forms of knowledge, as writing strategies. They are used in efforts to politicize the city and in urban writing to capture life and change in the world's major cities. Fragments of the City surveys the role of fragments in how urban worlds are understood, revealed, written, and changed.

Walt Dierks illuminates the everyday lives and adventures of young kids coming of age in Brooklyn during World War II. The main goal of most of them: get out of the house. The street was where the action was. It could be a stickball game featuring a pink Spaldeen and a broomstick or hooking a ride on a passing trolley car. There were other diversions, some perfectly legal, some bordering or stepping over into forbidden territory. The war years offered an environment of added responsibility alo