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Abstract: The first novel I ever read in Japanese was Matsumoto Seichō’s 松本清張 Points and Lines (Ten to sen 点と線), a detective story by one of Japan’s finest practitioners of the genre.1 It appealed both as a whodunit and because so much of the story hinged on the author’s well-placed faith in the to-the-minute accuracy of Japanese railway timetables, which I too had learned to count on. In retrospect, I can say confidently that I missed many details of the narrative as well as the nuances of Matsumoto’s social criticism, but the experience remains with me as a sort of capstone to my initial immersion in Japanese culture and language.The first canonical early twentieth-century author I read in Japanese was Tanizaki Jun’ichirō ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the autumn of 1084, su shi 蘇軾 (hao 號 [alternative name] Dongpo 東坡; 1037–1101) became implicated in an artisan’s death. Four years into a sentence of exile for his political protests in verse, the preeminent Northern Song poet, or “Immortal Po” (Poxian 坡仙) as he became known to his admirers, drafted a short ode for a contemporaneous ink maker named Pan Gu 潘谷 (n.d.), a piece that appears to have been intended as a gift in exchange for a new supply of ink. In the final couplet, Su conferred on the craftsman the honorary epithet of the Ink Immortal (Moxian 墨仙), celebrating the reputation of a master who had attained a form of transcendence through his diligent labor. Shortly thereafter, rumors started to circulate ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Early in emperor gaozong’s 高宗 second, or Shaoxing 紹興, reign (1131–1163), the daughter of official Li Chaozheng 李朝正 (1096–1155) was suffering from a recurrence of smallpox sores. Red blisters suddenly appeared all over her body, and her pain became too great to endure. When it seemed as though she was about to die, Li Chaozheng “happened upon” (ou jian 偶見, lit., fortuitously saw) a medical “formula” (fang 方) collected in a materia medica, or pharmaceutical manual (bencao 本草). The formula called for boiling the herb shengma 升麻 (bugbane, Lat. Cimicifuga foetida) with honey. Li fetched the ingredients as quickly as he could and applied the therapy. His daughter’s pain ceased almost immediately.This event led Li ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the early 1930s, tanizaki jun’ichirō 谷崎潤一郎 (1886–1965) launched a new phase in his storied literary career when he began writing historical fiction. These works number among his most celebrated compositions. This article focuses on one of these works, the historical novella Bushūkō hiwa 武州公秘話 (Secret history of the Lord of Musashi, 1931–1932;1935). This idiosyncratic piece of historical fiction recounts in lurid detail the sexual fetish of a fictional sixteenth-century warrior of the Kiryū 桐生 clan: Terukatsu 輝勝, the Lord of Musashi 武蔵公.1 Tanizaki structures the tale around Terukatsu’s lifelong fascination with so-called onna-kubi 女首 (woman-head), an actual medieval Japanese term, the meaning of which Tanizaki ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This article began with my attempt to translate the “Rhapsody on the Black [and Mysterious] Gibbon” (“Xuanyuan fu” 玄猿賦) by the Tang-period (618–907) Daoist, Wu Yün 吳筠 (d. 788) and expanded to become a study of the political deployments of the human–animal continuum and selfhood as portrayed in medieval Daoist and Buddhist writings.1 The connecting thread is a consideration of the challenges that the Buddhist religion brought to Chinese notions of self and the way these challenges were countered. Rebirth as an animal was first adjusted to Chinese sensibilities in Buddhist scriptures composed in China. Daoists eventually accepted the possibility of animal rebirth but further modified some of the mechanisms that ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The four recent publications by well-established scholars reviewed here open exciting new perspectives on medieval Daoism, building solidly on previous research while moving the field forward toward a better overall understanding. They each come at the religion from different angles and work with various dimensions, centering on different social strata, religious schools, and other key features. As a result, taken together, they provide a refreshing and most intriguing picture of the wide scope and multifaceted nature of medieval Chinese religiosity.To begin, Franciscus Verellen in Imperiled Destinies: The Daoist Quest for Deliverance in Medieval China describes various concepts of destiny and causation, the ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In these three first books, a new generation of scholars looks at sound, music, and the relation between speech and writing in modern Japan. Seth Jacobowitz focuses on the mediation between speech and writing and, more specifically, on a new belief in the power of realism that paved the way for the realist novel of the Meiji period (1868–1912). Kerim Yasar is also interested in how the voice is recorded, but he focuses specifically on sound—its reproduction and transmission—from 1868 to 1945. Hiromu Nagahara looks at a different set of voices, Japanese popular songs (ryūkōka 流行歌), from their rise in the 1920s to their triumph in the 1970s. In summary, if Nagahara is writing a history of music and Yasar a history of ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1999, Kim Chi-ŭn, a North Korean doctor, crossed the frozen Tumen River into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Suffering from cold and hunger, she sought help in a nearby farming village, inhabited by many ethnic Koreans. Along with Kim, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans left the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for China during the difficult years of the 1990s and early 2000s. Some stayed temporarily while others sought to leave their homeland forever. The influx of North Koreans raised all sorts of questions in both China and beyond: Should the PRC government simply repatriate them immediately' Should it acknowledge their economic- or even political-refugee status and allow them to stay in ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1964, Princeton University Press published an edited volume of conference papers titled Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey.1 A brief comparison of its chapters on education with Raja Adal’s monograph, which pairs Japan with a different eastern Mediterranean country, allows for some preliminary observations concerning the arc of historical scholarship on education and modernization in Japan and beyond during the ensuing fifty-five years.Writing during the formative period of area studies and the apogee of modernization theory, contributors to the Princeton volume approach modernization as “a process of long-range cultural and social change accepted by members of the changing society as beneficial ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Nguyễn Cư Trinh 阮居貞 (1716–1767) and Mạc Thiên Tứ 鄚天賜 (Ch. Mo Tianci; ca. 1710–1780) are two outstanding figures in Vietnam’s southward expansion history. In contrast to the notable Vietnamese general Nguyễn Cư Trinh, whose effort in southern border protection was acknowledged as his great contribution to this enterprise of the Nguyễn lords (who ruled central and southern Vietnam 1558–1777), Mạc Thiên Tứ received and developed a heritage from his father Mạc Cửu 鄚玖 (Ch. Mo Jiu; 1655–1735), a Chinese Ming loyalist who pledged allegiance to the Nguyễn lords and established Hà Tiên as a prosperous town in the far southern territory of present-day Vietnam. Although Nguyễn’s Sãi vãi (A monk and a nun), a long satirical ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Rostislav Berezkin, with the publication of Many Faces of Mulian 目連: The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China, has presented the world of Chinese vernacular studies with a landmark work. The volume presents in-depth and well-researched information on both the precious scrolls’ (baojuan 寶卷) prosimetric tradition and the story of Mulian rescuing his mother, a Buddhist narrative that has been adapted into many styles of drama, local storytelling, and vernacular print editions. As Victor Mair notes in the foreword, the present work follows in a line of outstanding scholarship on baojuan, conducted by scholars that include Sawada Mizuho 澤田瑞穂, Daniel L. Overmyer, Che Xilun 車錫倫, and Wilt L. Idema (p. ix).While ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Nation-Empire is based on groundbreaking research about how rural youth across the Japanese empire emerged as a formidable group of supporters of the imperial state during World War II. Bringing together robust primary-source research done in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, the book not only provides valuable information about little-known linkages across the empire but also sets a new standard for empire-wide study in the field of Japanese imperialism. In addition to the enlightening explanation of what motivated the youth to support the imperial state, readers are provided with novel insights into the minds of the youth that the author excavated from seldom-accessed personal accounts. The book provides unique ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The two works reviewed examine book culture and publishing in two very different periods of Chinese history. Suyoung Son’s Writing for Print looks at a particular set of publishing practices in the early part of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), a period that saw the culmination of many developments in Chinese book culture and when printed works (predominantly by woodblocks) went hand in hand with manuscript production. Her introduction lays out a highly ambitious plan for her book, including the examination of the complex relationships between writing and publishing (in the broad sense of the word), as well as state censorship in an age when printing had already been in use in China for a thousand years and when one ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This book was long in the making, having its beginnings in archival research done by the author as a graduate student in Japan from 1982 to 1984. It had been quietly simmering on a back burner since then, being visited every now and then when the author came across new publications or had the opportunity to visit field sites. In Chinese mythology, long gestation periods typically herald the miraculous births of saintly or divine beings. So a certain sense of heightened expectation has been building over the years as Professor ter Haar’s colleagues waited for his study of Guan Yu 關羽 (d. 219 or 220) to finally see the light of day. They will not be disappointed by the result.The figure of Guan Yu, or Lord Guan (Guan ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: “Religion” in Japan became both a problem and a problematized concept in the late nineteenth century. Buddhists in Japan met the first aspect, the aggressive persecution of Buddhism and the near elimination of several aspects of this once-dominant institution, in numerous ways. One of the more intriguing responses to this persecution was dedicated to the construction of a New Buddhist history. Works ranging from biographies of the Buddha, to studies of the geography of ancient India, to reviews of the early Buddhist conferences filled monograph after monograph and journal after journal as the New Buddhists sought to inscribe (or, one might say, recover) the origins of their faith within a specific and verifiable ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The dominant discourses on modern Korean Buddhism tend to rely on a dualistic paradigm that places nationalists on one side and collaborators on the other. In this understanding, Korean Buddhism is identified as pure Buddhism, which requires monastics to maintain celibacy and a vegetarian diet, whereas Japanese Buddhism is contaminated, since Japanese monastics may marry and eat meat. Problems of such a paradigm have been pointed out by scholars, especially in the English-speaking world. Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, the author of Korean Buddhist Empire: A Transnational History (1910–1945), is one of the major voices whose scholarship challenges the dualistic evaluation and gives attention to the complex reality of Korean ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit’s new book, Aesthetic Life, is a rich investigation into the emergence of the bijin 美人 (beautiful woman) as a prominent figure in mid-to-late Meiji- and Taishō-period Japanese culture. The immediate goal of the study is more specifically art-historical: to examine the factors that led to the emergence of bijinga 美人画 (paintings of beautiful women) as a distinct subbranch of nihonga 日本画 (Japanese-style painting) in the early twentieth century. But in doing so, Lippit uncovers the stunning ubiquity of the bijin, within and much beyond the visual field, as a figure continuously depicted in Japanese artworks and literary texts and discussed by prominent artists, critics, journalists, literary ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The study of the Catholic missions that accompanied late medieval and early modern European expansion has been something of a growth industry of late, touching even popular culture through films such as Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe (1991) and Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016). Though the missions to Tibet have yet to make it onto the screen, a small but steady flow of new scholarship in English has begun to make knowledge and understanding of them available to interested readers who may not be specialists in either Tibetan studies or missiology. Above all, two titles devoted to the voyage of Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733), a Jesuit originally from Pistoia in Tuscany, have brought renewed attention to that noteworthy ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This book packs quite a wallop. As the author puts it, “the subject of this book is not ‘empiricism’, ‘progress’ or ‘science’ but the legend that these and similar ideas have inspired. The question as concerns legend, the history of religion should teach us, is not whether it is true, but how it is told, how it is acted upon, and how it is reimagined, renegotiated and repeated” (p. 220). Morgan uses the word “legend” in a sense introduced by Philip Kitcher, a philosopher of science and other topics.1 By “Legend” (with a capital “L”), Kitcher means the convictions with which “successive generations of scientists have filled in more and more parts of the COMPLETE TRUE STORY OF THE WORLD” (emphasis in original, p. ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In this monumental book on song lyrics (ci 詞), Stephen Owen again revolutionizes the way Chinese literature is read. First of all, this book offers a radical reconsideration of the origins of the song-lyric tradition. I believe that one of Owen’s greatest contributions in this book is his claim that song lyrics originated in “the textualization of an existing practice” (p. 9). This brilliant point proves that the renowned scholar Ren Bantang’s 任半塘 theory about the “voiced poems of the Tang” (Tang shengshi 唐聲詩) is wrong.1 In his book, Ren argues that since the voiced poems of the Tang are isometric shi 詩 (poems), they cannot possibly be sung to the ci patterns, which are reserved for hetero-metric lyrics.2 But Owen ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The map on the cover of this fascinating book indicates the centrality of Ryukyu 琉球 in the maritime network extending from coastal Korea to the Japanese islands of Tsushima 対馬 and Iki 壱岐, along the western shore of Kyushu, and southward toward Taiwan and China’s littoral. Smits’s aim is to write a history of early Ryukyu outside the dominant framework of Confucian ideology. Much of this kingdom’s development from the late fourteenth century is tied to its role as a trading intermediary between Ming China and Southeast Asian dominions, as recorded in Lidai baoan 歴代宝案 (J. Rekidai hōan; Precious documents of successive generations).1 Smits sees a need to reconsider the idea that situates Ryukyu as purely a tributary ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Nancy Steinhardt’s Chinese Architecture: A History is a sweeping survey of monumental architecture, tombs, and city plans from the Neolithic period through the twentieth century. Among her largely chronological arrangement of chapters, the author also includes useful supplementary sections on Yingzao fashi 營造法式 (a Song-dynasty building treatise), houses, and gardens. A splendidly illustrated quarto-sized tome, Chinese Architecture stands in a certain tradition of attempted comprehensiveness in English-language books on the subject, which includes Laurence G. Liu’s 1989 publication and the 2002 multiauthored volume Steinhardt edited.1 This book, however, supersedes its predecessors in its comprehensiveness and ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: At the beginning of her study of the Three Kingdoms era (220–263) and its later representations, Professor Tian draws a fundamental distinction. The literary historical account of the era (often referred to as “Jian’an Wei” 建安魏) is associated with the Cao 曹 family and their salon, especially with the poetic output of the so-called Seven Masters of the Jian’an era (Jian’an qizi 建安七子); this is the wen 文 (“civil”) history of the time, remembered through a handful of canonical texts. Then there is the more popular wu 武 (“martial”) aspect of the era that developed in the late medieval and early modern periods; this version has the great Ming dynasty (1368–1644) novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義) ... Read More PubDate: 2021-12-12T00:00:00-05:00
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