On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped roof. There a woman named Taki has worked as a maidservant in the house and lived with its owners, the Hirai family. Now, near the end of her life, Taki is writing down in a notebook her nostalgic memories of the time spent living in the house. Her journal captures the refined middle-class life of the time from her gentle perspective. At the end of the novel, however, a startling final chapter is added. The chapter brings to light, after Taki’s death, a fact not described in her notebook. This suddenly transforms the world that had been viewed through the lens of a nostalgic memoir, so that a dramatic, flesh-and-blood story takes shape. Nakajima manages to combine skillful dialogue with a dazzling ending. The result is a polished, masterful work fully deserving of the Naoki Prize.

    Includes timeless tales that resonates with readers of all ages.

    Although Tada's writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women's inner lives make her very much a poet of the world. Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada's extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional free verse, poems in the traditional forms of tanka and haiku, and prose poems. Translator Jeffrey Angles introduces this collection with an incisive essay that situates Tada as a poet, explores her unique style, and analyzes her contribution to the representation of women in postwar Japanese literature.

    East Asia Studies. Translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu. TIME OF SKY & CASTLES IN THE AIR is the first full-length translation of Ayane Kawata's poetry to be published in English. This single volume contains Kawata's first book of poems, Time of Sky (first published in Japanese by Kumo Publishers, 1969), and her sixth, Castles in the Air: A Dream Journal (first published in Japanese by Shoshi Yamada, 1991). Translator Sawako Nakayasu writes in the Afterword: "In TIME OF SKY we find terse lines that are unresolved--the tension is neither built nor released, but exists as if in its natural state, a note of music forever in suspension. It never arrives--it is and never was home..." and of CASTLES IN THE AIR Nakayasu writes: "Its poems are derived from a notebook the author kept for 15 years, in which she recorded her dreams every morning upon waking.... The logic in these prose poems may feel familiar to us as dream logic, but we also find in them the complexity and anxiety attendant to of a lifetime spent living in a culture not one's own, an ongoing reckoning with one's dangers and desires, and the difficulty (and absurdity) of trying to communicate with others." Cover art by Mauro Zamora.

    The cargo ship on which she was evacuated from Singapore in 1942 was shelled, leaving her on a makeshift raft with 16 other survivors. One by one they perished, leaving her alone, burnt black by the sun, and suffering from heat exhaustion and dehydration. Discovered by a Japanese destroyer and imprisoned on Banka Island, Turner was beaten and tortured, before being taken to the notorious Palembang jail. Here, crammed with murderers and rapists in a filthy cell, she spent six months, living in daily fear of joining the many who were noisily tortured and executed. In this, the first biography for 40 years, Penny Starns describes the often horrific, but occasionally heart-warming, experiences of this unbreakable woman who, not content with surviving the war, went on to become a brigadier and Chief Military Nurse. Using recently released material from The National Archives and Turner's own words, she re-analyses the Pacific conflict against a backdrop of one woman's incredible fortitude and strength, and brings the story of a remarkable woman to life.

    He remains one of the most creative and stimulating thinkers of twentieth-century Japan. Ango was catapulted into the public consciousness in the months immediately following Japan's surrender to the Allied Forces in 1945. The energy and iconoclasm of his writings were matched by the outrageous and outsized antics of his life. Behind that life, and in the midst of those tumultuous times, Ango spoke with a cutting clarity. The essays and translations included in Literary Mischief probe some of the most volatile issues of culture, ideology, and philosophy of postwar Japan. Represented among the essayists are some of Japan's most important contemporary critics (e.g., Karatani K?jin and Ogino Anna). Many of Ango's works were produced during Japan's wars in China and the Pacific, a context in which words and ideas carried dire consequences for both writers and readers. All of the contributions to this volume consider this dimension of Ango's legacy, and it forms one of the thematic threads tying the volume together. The essays use Ango's writings to situate his accomplishment and contribute to our understanding of the potentials and limitations of radical thought in times of cultural nationalism, war, violence, and repression. This collection of essays and translations takes advantage of current interest in Sakaguchi Ango's work and makes available to the English-reading audience translations and critical work heretofore unavailable. As a result, the reader will come away with a coherent sense of Ango the individual and the writer, a critical apparatus for evaluating Ango, and access to new translations of key texts.

    Chad lived with Yamaguchi in Nagasaki during the summer of 2009 to gain insight and instruction in order to create the most accurate translations possible. Chad includes in the book a lengthy introductory essay about Yamaguchi's experience to provide essential context for the poems, and he has also written a preface in Japanese for Japanese readers. "I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me to Nagasaki," Yamaguchi recalled decades after the bombings as he tried to explain his incredulity at the terrifying d�j� vu. Yamaguchi's testimony of those days and subsequent years living with the physical and psychological trauma characterize the theme of his poems translated in Raft of Corpses. The paradox of surviving two atomic bombs to live on for six decades stirs in the readers of Yamaguchi's tanka poems simultaneous feelings of awe, disbelief, horror, sympathy, and hope. The poetry included in Raft of Corpses "passes the baton" carried by Yamaguchi to convey the experience of the atomic bombings and spread a message of the importance of world peace and the necessity to abolish nuclear weapons. In that spirit, Chad has selected and translated a total of sixty-five of Yamaguchi's tanka poems to commemorate the sixty-fifth anniversary of the bombings this year (2010). The book also includes numerous photographs and images of Yamaguchi's hand-written poems and calligraphy. Some of Yamaguchi's paintings add an additional layer to the book, and Chad hopes that the many poems included that do not address the bombings will provide readers with a better understanding of Yamaguchi's life and personality. Donald Keene, Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, writes in the foreword, "Chad Diehl has translated some of Mr. Yamaguchi's poems. The translations transmit the horror of the two terrible explosions and the disfigured dead. He has kept as close to the originals as possible, but remembering Mr. Yamaguchi's fondness for rhymed poetry, he has effectively used rhyme in some of the translations. It could not have been easy to translate these poems, but Mr. Diehl, who knew Mr. Yamaguchi well, felt impelled to make these translations, the most fitting tribute to his memory."

    

    Yet the single year in which Japanese forces occupied territory from Alaska to Indonesia was followed by three years of terrible defeat. Nevertheless, until the shattering end of the war, many Japanese continued to believe in the invincibility of their country. But in the diaries of well-known writers--including Nagai Kafu, Takami Jun, Yamada Futaru, and Hirabayashi Taiko--and the scholar Watanabe Kazuo, varying doubts were vividly, though privately, expressed.Donald Keene, renowned scholar of Japan, selects from these diaries, some written by authors he knew well. Their revelations were sometimes poignant, sometimes shocking to Keene. Ito Sei's fervent patriotism and even claims of racial superiority stand in stark contrast to the soft-spoken, kindly man Keene knew. Weaving archival materials with personal recollections and the intimate accounts themselves, Keene reproduces the passions aroused during the war and the sharply contrasting reactions in the year following Japan's surrender. Whether detailed or fragmentary, these entries communicate the reality of false victory and all-too-real defeat.

    Many people think of this occurrence as one terrible event in the past, which is studied from history books.Shimako Murai and other 'Women of Hiroshima' believe otherwise: for them, the bomb had after-effects which affected countless people for decades, effects that were all the more menacing for their unpredictability - and often, invisibility.This play, based on a true story, tells the tale of two such people: on the surface successful modern women, yet each bearing underneath hidden scars as horrific as the keloids that disfigured Hibakusha on the days following the bomb.

    For most of East Asia, Buddhist sutras were written in classical Chinese and inaccessible to many devotees. How, then, did such devotees access these texts? Charlotte D. Eubanks argues that the medieval genre of “explanatory tales” illuminates the link between human body (devotee) and sacred text (sutra). Her highly original approach to understanding Buddhist textuality focuses on the sensual aspects of religious experience and also looks beyond Japan to explore pre-modern book history, practices of preaching, miracles of reading, and the Mahayana Buddhist “cult of the book.”

    This collection marks the first time these works have been translated into English.

    Naff, the distinguished scholar of Japanese literature widely known and highly regarded for his eloquent translations of the writings of Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943), spent the last years of his life writing a full-length biography of Toson. Virtually completed at the time of his death, The Kiso Road provides a rich and colorful account of this canonic novelist who, along with Natsume Soseki and Mori Ogai, formed the triumvirate of writers regarded as giants in Meiji Japan, all three of whom helped establish the parameters of modern Japanese literature. Professor Naff's biography skillfully places Toson in the context of his times and discusses every aspect of his career and personal life, as well as introducing in detail a number of his important but as yet untranslated works.Toson's long life, his many connections with other important Japanese artists and intellectuals, his sojourn in France during World War I, and his later visit to South America, permit a biography of depth and detail that serves as a kind of cultural history of Japan during an often turbulent period. The Kiso Road, as approachable and exciting as any novel, with Toson himself as its complex protagonist, is arguably the most thorough account of any modern Japanese writer presently available in English.

    Commentary (novels not included).