The very best readings on Japanese culture, aesthetics, identity, psyche, and philosophy

2022/11/25

Lately, I made my recommended reading list on Japanese culture, aesthetics, identity, and philosophy, firstly for two daughters of my American Japanese second generation cousin living in the suburb of San Francisco. I shared this list with my close friends as well later. Here, I share this with you all.

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🐤✨🎾01

★★★★★★★

Yasunari Kawabata

Nobel Lecture

English

Japanese

Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1968

(Translation)

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1968/kawabata/lecture/

美しい日本の私 (講談社現代新書)

https://amzn.asia/d/gkAI1QE

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🐤✨🎾02

★★★★★★

Kojin KARATANI

Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Post-contemporary interventions) (English Edition)

https://amzn.asia/d/b9m3w2Y

説明

内容紹介

Since its publication in Japan ten years ago, the Origins of Modern Japanese Literature has become a landmark book, playing a pivotal role in defining discussions of modernity in that country. Against a history of relative inattention on the part of Western translators to modern Asian critical theory, this first English publication is sure to have a profound effect on current cultural criticism in the West. It is both the boldest critique of modern Japanese literary history to appear in the post-war era and a major theoretical intervention, which calls into question the idea of modernity that informs Western consciousness. In a sweeping reinterpretation of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Japanese literature, Karatani Kojin forces a reconsideration of the very assumptions underlying our concepts of modernity. In his analysis, such familiar terms as origin, modern, literature, and the state reveal themselves to be ideological constructs. Karatani weaves many separate strands into an argument that exposes what has been hidden in both Japanese and Western accounts of the development of modern culture. Among these strands are: the "discovery" of landscape in painting and literature and its relation to the inwardness of individual consciousness; the similar "discovery" in Japanese drama of the naked face as another kind of landscape produced by interiority; the challenge to the dominance of Chinese characters in writing; the emergence of confessional literature as an outgrowth of the repression of sexuality and the body; the conversion of the samurai class to Christianity; the mythologizing of tuberculosis, cancer, and illness in general as a producer of meaning; and the "discovery" of "the child" as an independent category of human being. A work that will be important beyond the confines of literary studies, Karatani's analysis challenges basic Western presumptions of theoretical centrality and originality and disturbs the binary opposition of the "West" to its so-called "other." Origins of Modern Japanese Literature should be read by all those with an interest in the development of cultural concepts and in the interrelating factors that have determined modernity.

レビュー

"Karatani's ear for anecdotes makes the book more than a dry theoretical exercise. For the English edition, Brett de Bary and her team of co-translators add background information, and an entirely new essay by Karatani, 'The Extinction of Genre, ' is included. This additional material makes the translation worth a look even for those who can read the original."--Matt Treyvaud "Japan Times" (10/31/2015 12:00:00 AM) "I have hopes that Karatani's book--one of those infrequent moments in which a rare philosophical intelligence rises to the occasion of full national and historical statement--will also have a fundamental impact on literary criticism in the West. . . . For Origins has some lessons for us about critical pluralism, in addition to its principal message, which turns on that old and new topic of modernity itself."--Fredric Jameson, from the Preface

著者について

Karatani Kojin is Professor of Humanities at Hosei University in Tokyo, Japan. Brett de Bary is Professor of Japanese Literature at Cornell University.

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🐤✨🎾03

★★★★★

Haruki MURAKAMI

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel (Vintage International) (English Edition)

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

https://amzn.asia/d/0i3Fywr

説明

内容紹介

A "dreamlike and compelling” tour de force (Chicago Tribune)—an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II. In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

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🐤✨🎾04

★★★★★

Soseki NATSUME

Kokoro (Dover Books on Literature & Drama) (English Edition)

Kokoro: (Translated by Edward McClellan)

https://amzn.asia/d/gRyzRe5

https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B007WPLTOM?ref_=cm_sw_r_apin_dp_H9F1V0PRKZQG5HSYJG30

説明

"Rich in understanding and insight."—The New Yorker What is love, and what is friendship? What is the extent of our responsibility to ourselves and to others? Kokoro, signifying "the heart of things," examines these age-old questions in terms of the modern world. A trilogy of stories that explores the very essence of loneliness, Kokoro opens with "Sensei and I," in which the narrator recounts his relationship with an intellectual who dwells in isolation but maintains a sophisticated worldview. "My Parents and I" brings the reader into the narrator's family circle, and "Sensei and His Testament" features the eponymous character's explanation of how he came to live a life of solitude. Natsume Soseki (1867–1916), perhaps the greatest novelist of the Meiji period, remains one of Japan's most widely read authors. He wrote this novel in 1914, at the peak of his career, and it remains an excellent introduction to modern Japanese literature.

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🐤✨🎾05

★★★★

Soseki Natsume

Light and Darkness: Natsume Soseki's Meian (English Edition)

Light and Darkness: Natsume Sôseki's Meian: A New Translation By V. H. Viglielmo

https://amzn.asia/d/4fykmCL

説明

内容紹介

This is the last novel written by Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), Japan's preeminent modern novelist (which was uncompleted at his death). Translated from the Japanese by V.H. Viglielmo. Susan Sontag called it a neglected masterpiece of the twentieth century. Also contains a new Translator's Afterword

著者について

Natsume Soseki: http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natsume_Soseki Translator V. H. Viglielmo: http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._H._Viglielm

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🐤✨🎾06

★★★

Hayao KAWAI

The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan (English Edition)

https://amzn.asia/d/cUUV9f4

説明

This book examines the haunting, sad, and lively depths of the Japanese soul by interpreting some of major themes in fairy tales. A Japanese Jungian psychologist credited with founding Japanese analytical and clinical psychology and a senior professor at Kyoto University, Hayao Kawai (1928–2007) addresses here such questions as why so many Japanese fairy tales end in a “Happily ever after” marriage, and why the female figure best expresses the culture’s ego and the country’s possible future. Throughout the book, Kawai delicately presents the multiple layers of the Japanese psyche. The American poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who lived for years in Japan, gaining familiarity with the soul of its culture and thought, introduces Kawai’s book to the reader.

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🐤✨🎾07

★★★★★

Haruki Murakami Goes to Meet Hayao Kawai

https://amzn.asia/d/ipB8TzY

説明

内容紹介

Two of Japan's foremost contemporary cultural spokespersons met for an informal conversation with remarkable results. While their extended talk took place at a particular location at a particular moment in history, much of the content is timeless and universal. After popular acclaim in Japan, the transcript now makes its first appearance in English. Topics from the Contents:

• The Meaning of Commitment

• Words or Images?

• Making Stories

• Answering Logically versus Answering Compassionately

• Self-Healing and Novels

• Marriage and 'Well-digging'

• Curing and Living

• Stories and the Body

• The Relationship between a Work and its Author

• Individuality and Universality

• Violence and Expression

• Where are We Headed?

著者について

Hayao Kawai was Minister of Culture for ­Japan and decorated as a 'Person of Cultural ­Merit'. He originally studied mathematics, then trained to become a Jungian psychoanalyst and sandplay therapist in Zürich. Back in his native country, he went on to introduce Jung's psychology and sandplay therapy. Kawai became a well-known writer and television personality in Japan and also abroad; many of his works have been translated into other languages.Haruki Murakami began to write at the age of 30 and blossomed into one of the premier writers of his generation. He has been awarded numerous honors in Japan as well as internationally, including the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and many others. He is known for his journalistic pieces, short stories and genre-defying novels, including The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, A Wild Sheep Chase, Wind/Pinball and 1Q84.

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