Böcker utgivna av U of M Center for Japanese Studies

Published serially between 1928 and 1931, Shanghai tells the story of a group of Japanese expatriates living in the International Settlement at the time of the May 30th Incident of 1925. The personal lives and desires of the main characters play out against a historical backdrop of labor unrest, factional intrigue, colonialist ambitions, and racial politics.The author, Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947), was an essayist, writer, and critical theorist who became one of the most powerful and influential literary figures in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1924 Yokomitsu joined with Kataoka Teppei and Kawabata Yasunari to found the Shinkankaku-ha (New Sensation School), artists who looked to contemporary avant-garde movements in Europe--Dadaism, futurism, surrealism, expressionism--for inspiration in their effort to explode the conventions of literary language and to break free of what they saw as the prisonhouse of modern culture. A key feature of the school's experiments was the use of jarring imagery that originated in the visual effects of cinema.Yokomitsu incorporated the striking visuality of his early experimental style into a realistic mode that presents a disturbing picture of a city in turmoil. The result is a brilliant evocation of Shanghai as a gritty ideological battleground where dreams of sexual and economic domination are nurtured.

Japan: From Prehistory to Modern Times has a heavy emphasis upon the premodern period of Japanese history. No attempt has been made to provide the usual kind of textbook completeness. Hall's fascination with Japanese history lies within the manner in which Japan's political and social institutions have changed and diversified over time and how this fundamentally "Eastern" culture gave rise to a modern world power. Japan is today a modern nation in the full sense of the term. Yet its history is less familiar to us than the histories of those Western powers that it has now outstripped, or of the other countries of Asia that have gained recognition as the birthplaces of ancient civilizations or world religions. Japanese history does not force itself upon the world's attention as does the mainstream of European history or the exotic chronicles of China or India. Its significance has become apparent only in proportion to the recognition Japan has gained as a modern state and as scholars have begun to place Japanese history within a world context.

A Japanese literary classic and one of the world's earliest novels, the Tale of Genji was written C.E. 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman from an aristocratic family. Norma Field, drawing on her own sensitive reading of Genji and on Japanese and Western scholarship, discusses the social, psychological, and political dimensions of the aesthetics of the work, with emphasis on the crucial relationship of erotic and political concerns to prose fiction. The shifting configurations of the tale are exposed, showing how the hero Genji is made and unmade by a series of heroines.