The Chieko Poems


Book Description

The major influence and subject of Takamura's work was Naganuma Cheiko, an early member of the feminist movement Seitosha. They were married in 1914 and modelled their relationship on sexual equality. In 1931, Cheiko began to show signs of schizophrenia and, in 1932, she attempted suicide. She was institutionalised in 1935 and died there of tuberculosis in 1938. The poems in this volume are touching portraits of his wife and their life together from the time of their courtship until some years after her death.




A Brief History of Imbecility


Book Description

Takamura Kotaro (1883-1956) drew on his studies in New York, London, and Paris to lay the foundations in Japan for Western-style Japanese sculpture through his intricate wood carvings and powerful bronzes. But Takamura also composed poems infused with startling energy, directness, and narrative clarity. Among the first to use the vernacular masterfully in verse, he has long been recognized as one of Japan's premier modern poets. Takamura thus stood in the confluence of two artistic currents, both shaping and being shaped by them. His personal experiences, from exultation to tragedy, found expression through this dynamic. Hiroaki Sato now captures a lucid picture of Takamura's eloquent struggle with art and with life. Originally published in 1980 as Chieko and Other Poems, this expanded volume includes a new introduction and a new selection of Takamura's essays on art and other subjects. The poetry included here is divided into three parts: "The Journey" represents a chronology of the poet's life; "Chieko" is a selection of poems about Takamura's wife which describes his devotion to her for more than thirty years through courtship and marriage, during her illness and insanity, and continuing after her death; and "A Brief History of Imbecility" is a sequence of twenty autobiographical poems composed in 1947. The essays, appearing in English for the first time, offer a more complete understanding of Takamura's relationship to art, his complex experience of Paris, and his views on beauty and creativity. Included here are "The Latter Half of Chieko's Life," a moving prose complement to the Chieko poems, and "A Last Glance at the Third Ministry of Education Art Exhibition," a scathing review of the modern art world, the first of its kind in Japan.







Japan's Love-Hate Relationship with the West


Book Description

Introductory chapters cover Japan’s historic love-hate relationship with China, then an in-depth analysis of three themes: Japan’s turn to the West; Japan’s return to the East; from war to peace. The book explains why Japanese modern writers oscillate between East and West.




The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature


Book Description

This extraordinary one-volume guide to the modern literatures of China, Japan, and Korea is the definitive reference work on the subject in the English language. With more than one hundred articles that show how a host of authors and literary movements have contributed to the general literary development of their respective countries, this companion is an essential starting point for the study of East Asian literatures. Comprehensive thematic essays introduce each geographical section with historical overviews and surveys of persistent themes in the literature examined, including nationalism, gender, family relations, and sexuality. Following the thematic essays are the individual entries: over forty for China, over fifty for Japan, and almost thirty for Korea, featuring everything from detailed analyses of the works of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro and Murakami Haruki, to far-ranging explorations of avant-garde fiction in China and postwar novels in Korea. Arrayed chronologically, each entry is self-contained, though extensive cross-referencing affords readers the opportunity to gain a more synoptic view of the work, author, or movement. The unrivaled opportunities for comparative analysis alone make this unique companion an indispensable reference for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of Asian literature. Although the literatures of China, Japan, and Korea are each allotted separate sections, the editors constantly kept an eye open to those writers, works, and movements that transcend national boundaries. This includes, for example, Chinese authors who lived and wrote in Japan; Japanese authors who wrote in classical Chinese; and Korean authors who write in Japanese, whether under the colonial occupation or because they are resident in Japan. The waves of modernization can be seen as reaching each of these countries in a staggered fashion, with eddies and back-flows between them then complicating the picture further. This volume provides a vivid sense of this dynamic interplay.




Sleeping, Sinning, Falling


Book Description

Sleeping Sinning Falling is a generous volume of selected and new poems, written over the last twenty-five years by one of the major voices in twentieth century Japanese poetry. The translations are by Hiroaki Sato, who has published over twelve books in English translation. One of them, From the Country of Eight Islands, an anthology of Japanese poetry which he translated and edited with Burton Watson, won the American P.E.N. translation prize for 1982.




The End of Imagination


Book Description

Five books of essays in one volume from the Booker Prize–winner and “one of the most ambitious and divisive political essayists of her generation” (The Washington Post). With a new introduction by Arundhati Roy, this new collection begins with her pathbreaking book The Cost of Living—published soon after she won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things—in which she forcefully condemned India’s nuclear tests and its construction of enormous dam projects that continue to displace countless people from their homes and communities. The End of Imagination also includes her nonfiction works Power Politics, War Talk, Public Power in the Age of Empire, and An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, which include her widely circulated and inspiring writings on the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the need to confront corporate power, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions globally. Praise for Arundhati Roy “The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart.” —Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and recipient of the LennonOno Grant for Peace Award “Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays.” —Howard Zinn, author of Political Awakenings and Indispensable Zinn “Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness. And in these extraordinary essays—which are clarions for justice, for witness, for a true humanity—Roy is at her absolute best.” —Junot Díaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao “One of the most confident and original thinkers of our time.” —Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and The Battle For Paradise “Arundhati Roy calls for ‘factual precision’ alongside of the ‘real precision of poetry.’ Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach.” —Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hopes and Prospects “India’s most impassioned critic of globalization and American influence.” —The New York Times




The New Human Revolution, vol. 21


Book Description

Through this novelized history of the Soka Gakkai—one of the most dynamic, diverse, and empowering movements in the world today—readers will discover the organization's goals and achievements even as they find inspiring and practical Buddhist wisdom for living happily and compassionately in today's world. The book recounts the stories of ordinary individuals who faced tremendous odds in transforming their lives through the practice of Nichiren Buddhism and in bringing Buddhism's humanistic teachings to the world. This inspiring narrative provides readers with the principles with which they can positively transform their own lives for the better and realize enduring happiness for themselves and others.




China Root


Book Description

A beautifully compelling and liberating guide to the original nature of Zen in ancient China by renowned author and translator David Hinton. Buddhism migrated from India to China in the first century C.E., and Ch'an (Japanese: Zen) is generally seen as China's most distinctive and enduring form of Buddhism. In China Root, however, David Hinton shows how Ch'an was in fact a Buddhist-influenced extension of Taoism, China's native system of spiritual philosophy. Unlike Indian Buddhism's abstract sensibility, Ch'an was grounded in an earthy and empirically-based vision. Exploring this vision, Hinton describes Ch'an as a kind of anti-Buddhism. A radical and wild practice aspiring to a deeply ecological liberation: the integration of individual consciousness with landscape and with a Cosmos seen as harmonious and alive. In China Root, Hinton describes this original form of Zen with his trademark clarity and elegance, each chapter exploring in enlightening ways a core Ch'an concept--such as meditation, mind, Buddha, awakening--as it was originally understood and practiced in ancient China. Finally, by examining a range of standard translations in the Appendix, Hinton reveals how this original understanding and practice of Ch'an/Zen is almost entirely missing in contemporary American Zen, because it was lost in Ch'an's migration from China through Japan and on to the West. Whether you practice Zen or not, taking this journey on the wings of Hinton's remarkable insight and powerful writing will transform how you understand yourself and the world.




National Union Catalog


Book Description

Includes entries for maps and atlases.