Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature

by Rachael Hutchinson (Editor), Leith Douglas Morton (Editor)

Overview

This new 2^nd edition of the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature provides a comprehensive survey of the field of modern Japanese literature and gives readers an overview of how we study Japanese literature today.

Including sections on space and time, gender and sexuality, politics, war memory, national and colonial identities and the production and dissemination of literature, the Handbook examines the ways in which it is possible to read modern Japanese literature and situate it in relation to critical theory. It also features updated and brand-new chapters addressing the works of internationally renowned writers such as Futabatei Shimei and Murakami Haruki and defines the way writers produce literature in modern Japan, as well as how those works have been read and understood by different readers in different time periods.

Written by an international team of experts, the Handbook examines modes of literary production such as fiction, poetry, and critical essays as distinct forms of expression that nonetheless are closely interrelated and as such it will be a vital resource for students and scholars of Japanese Literature, literature in translation and modern and contemporary literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032821528
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/15/2025
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	468
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Rachael Hutchinson is Elias Ahuja Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Delaware, USA. Her research focuses on identity and representation in Japanese fiction, film, manga and videogames.

Leith Morton is a Professor Emeritus of the Tokyo Institute of Technology (now Institute of Science Tokyo), Japan.

Table of Contents

Introduction  Section 1: Literature, Space and Time  1. Space and Time in Modern Japanese Literature  2. Literature Short on Time: Modern Moments in Haiku and Tanka  3. Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and Stories of Prewar Tokyo  4. Inner Pieces: Isolation, Inclusion, and Interiority in Modern Women’s Fiction  Section 2: Gender, Sexuality and the Body  5. Queer Reading and Modern Japanese Literature  6. Feminism and Japanese Literature  7. Nagai Kafū’s Feminist Perspective  Section 3: Literature and Politics  8. The Proletarian Literature Movement: Experiment and Experience  9. Writing and Politics: Japanese Literature and the Fifteen Years War (1931-1945)  10. Expedient Conversion? Tenkō in Transwar Japanese Literature  11. Postwar Japanese Fiction and the Legacy of Unequal Japan–US Relations  Section 4: Writing War Memory  12. Critical Postwar War Literature: Trauma, Narrative Memory and Responsible History  13. Writing and Remembering the Battle of Okinawa: War Memory and Literature  14. The Need to Narrate the Tokyo Air Raids: The Literature of Saotome Katsumoto  Section 5: National and Colonial Identities  15. Framing Dysfluency in Modern Japanese Literature: Speech Disability, Language Exper-iments, and the National Subject  16. Abusive Medicine and Continued Culpability: The Japanese Empire and its Aftermaths in East Asian Literatures  17. National Literature and Beyond: Mizumura Minae and Hideo Levy  18. Listening In: The Languages of the Body in Kim Ch’ang-Saeng’s ‘Crimson Fruit’  Section 6: Bunjin and the Bundan  19. Kuki Shūzō as Philosopher-Poet  20. The Akutagawa/Tanizaki Debate: Actors in Bundan Discourse  21. The Rise of Women Writers, the Heisei I-novel, and the Contemporary Bundan  22. Standing with the Egg: Murakami Haruki’s Two-World Literature  Section 7: Literature and Technology  23. Electronic Literature and Youth Culture: The Rise of the Japanese Cell Phone Novel  24. Narrative in the Digital Age: from Light Novels to Web Serials  25. Japanese Twitterature: Global Media, Formal Innovation, Cultural Différance

Editorial Reviews

"The Routledge Handbook is particularly refreshing because it does not tackle Japanese literature from an exclusively chronological perspective. Instead, the essays are grouped thematically, creating sections on space and time, gender and sexuality, identity, technology and several others. As Rachael Hutchinson and Leith Morton aptly argue in their introduction, it is this inclusion of significant sections on queer and female fiction that differentiates this handbook from its predecessors and makes it truly up-to-date."

Alice French, The Japan Society

From the Publisher