New Books in Japanese Studies

Manga historian Ryan Holmberg introduces the influential alternative manga artist Murasaki Yamada (1948-2009) to English readers through a scholarly translation of Talk to My Back (1981-1984), Yamada’s feminist examination of the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams. The manga is paired with an extensive essay by Dr. Holmberg, in which he positions Yamada’s oeuvre within the history of alternative manga and Yamada’s manga within her life. Alternative manga is primarily associated with male artists in the United States, but Holmberg illuminates why that came to be and how that image varies from reality through his examination of Yamada’s oeuvre.Talk to My Back (Drawn & Quarterly, 2022) portrays a woman's relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence, and with her husband, who works late and sees his wife as little more than a domestic servant. While engaging frankly with the compromises of marriage and motherhood, Yamada saves her harshest criticisms for society at large, particularly its false promises of eternal satisfaction within the nuclear family.Ryan Holmberg is a comics historian and translator. He is the author of The Translator Without Talent (2020) and Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 (2010). He has edited and translated over two dozen manga, including the 2014 Eisner Award-winning edition of Tezuka Osamu’s The Mysterious Underground Men. His many essays and reviews can be found in such venues as The Comics Journal, Artforum International, and The New York Review. He has advised on exhibitions at the British Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art, and is currently Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He can be found on social media @mangaberg.Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University who researches Japanese culture and contemporary media. Her book, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, is forthcoming in 2023 from the University of Hawai’i Press. She consulted on the British Museum’s exhibition on manga, and her work has appeared in the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, the Journal of Popular Culture, Film Criticism, and the Washington Post, among other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Today I will be talking to Lasse Lehtonen about his book The 14th Moon, which came out with Bloomsbury this year (2022). With me today is Dr. Brooke McCorkle, who wrote her own book on Japanese musicians Shonen Knife, a band who also feature in my own work on punk in Kyoto. The 14th Moon is the title of an album by the Japanese singer-song writer Yuming, who although not punk at all, shares much with and impacted in one form or another the musicians Brooke and I look at, especially, the female musicians among them. This should not come as a surprise, as Yuming (Matsutoya Yumi) is one of the most influential figures in Japanese popular music history. A singer-songwriter recognized globally for her songs used in Miyazaki Hayao's beloved animations, Yuming has captured the hearts of listeners of different generations since her debut in the early 1970s. Her fourth album, The 14th Moon, released in November 1976, was a milestone in establishing her signature style: the posh, “city” sound that later paved the way to the 1980s City Pop and 1990s J-pop, and even what Brooke calls Josei or women rock. In addition to examining the album's astonishing stylistic versatility and its complex background, Lasse explores how Yuming revolutionized the position of women in Japanese popular music. The 14th  Moon teaches us much about the turbulent and transformative time of its recording and help us understanding the social changes in Japan of the 1970s, a usually under researched era in cultural history, after the stormy and radical era of the 1960s and just before the heyday of the consumerist bubble era of the 1980s.Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

From the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries Japanese monks created hundreds of maps to construct and locate their place in a Buddhist world. Expansively illustrated with multiple maps and illustrations, The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021) by D. Max Moerman is the first monograph of its kind to explore the largely unknown archive of Japanese Buddhist world maps and analyze their production, reproduction, and reception. In examining these fascinating sources of visual and material culture, Moerman argues for an alternative history of Japanese Buddhism—one that compels us to recognize the role of the Buddhist geographic imaginary in a culture that encompassed multiple cartographic and cosmological world views.The contents and contexts of Japanese Buddhist world maps reveal the ambivalent and shifting position of Japan in the Buddhist world, its encounter and negotiation with foreign ideas and technologies, and the possibilities for a global history of Buddhism and science. Moerman’s visual and intellectual history traces the multiple trajectories of Japanese Buddhist world maps, beginning with the earliest extant Japanese map of the world: a painting by a fourteenth-century Japanese monk charting the cosmology and geography of India and Central Asia based on an account written by a seventh-century Chinese pilgrim-monk. He goes on to discuss the cartographic inclusion and marginal position of Japan, the culture of the copy and the power of replication in Japanese Buddhism, and the transcultural processes of engagement and response to new visions of the world produced by Iberian Christians, Chinese Buddhists, and the Japanese maritime trade. Later chapters explore the transformations in the media and messages of Buddhist cartography in the age of print culture and in intellectual debates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries over cosmology and epistemology and the polemics of Buddhist science.The Japanese Buddhist World Map offers a wholly innovative picture of Japanese Buddhism that acknowledges the possibility of multiple and heterogeneous modernities and alternative visions of Japan and the world.D. Max Moerman is a Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College of Columbia University. His research interests lie in the visual and material culture of Japanese religions.Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

A young sake bar owner, Yusuke Shimoki, arrives on the doorstep of Hannah Kirshner’s Brooklyn apartment “with a suitcase full of Ishikawa sake,” in Hannah’s words. That visit sparked a years-long connection between Hannah and the rural Japanese community of Yamanaka, a home for artisans and artists, hunters and farmers, and other ordinary Japanese trying to live in the countryside.Those visits are the subject of Hannah’s book, Water Wood and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town, published in hardcover by Viking in 2021, and in paperback by Penguin this year. Hannah learns how to make sake, craft wooden trays, hunt ducks, farm vegetables, and several other activities common in this part of rural Japan.And, as an added bonus, readers get to see recipes garnered from Hannah’s time in Yamanaka!In this interview, Hannah and I talk about rural Japan, duck hunting, drinking sake and growing vegetables, as well as some of her favorite recipes in the book!Hannah Kirshner is a writer, artist, and food stylist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, T Magazine, Vogue, Saveur, Taste, Food 52, Atlas Obscura, and Food & Wine, among others. Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, Kirshner grew up on a small farm outside Seattle and divides her time between Brooklyn and rural Japan.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Water, Wood and Wild Things. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Often represented as a tradition of ancient origins, Shugendō has retained a quality of mystery and nostalgia in the public imagination and scholars as the “original” champions of mountain asceticism. In his monograph, A Path Into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi (U Hawaii Press, 2022), Caleb Carter challenges this conceptualization by examining historical documents of Mount Togakushi. By focusing on themes of narratives, institution, and ritual, Carter explores how the transmission of this complex religious system at Togakushi was not a natural phenomenon, but a conscious act by a practitioner from Mount Hiko. Using a variety of textual sources including origin stories (engi) and temple records, Carter demonstrates how the practitioners of Mount Togakushi utilize storytelling, institutional support, and ritual processes to not only provide legitimacy but also establish a foundation for Shugendō at Togakushi. With discussions on Shinto and women’s exclusion (nyonin kekkai), staple topics in Japanese religions, A Path Into the Mountains offers something for those interested in not just Shugendō but also Buddhism, mountain religions, and religious history.Raditya Nuradi is a Phd candidate at Kyushu University. He works on religion and popular culture, particularly anime pilgrimages. His research explores pilgrims' experiences through space and materiality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Cultural historians Morgan Pitelka and Reiko Tanimura partner with one of Japan’s premier experts in calligraphy and letter writing, Takashi Masuda, to translate and annotate twenty-three unique letters alongside images of the hand-brushed originals. Each letter is presented first in its original format as a brushed piece of calligraphy. The authors provide a transcription of the letter into Japanese, followed by an English translation. Next is a commentary with the biography of the letter’s author and in some cases the addressee, the context for its writing, and brief descriptions of relevant locations, individuals, and historical events mentioned therein. Letters from Japan's Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (IEAS, 2021) offers readers rare access in English to the voices of renowned historical figures from Japan’s Age of Unification and early Edo period.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Celebrating Sorrow: Medieval Tributes to the Tale of Sagoromo (Cornell UP, 2022) explores the medieval Japanese fascination with grief in tributes to The Tale of Sagoromo, the classic story of a young man whose unrequited love for his foster sister leads him into a succession of romantic tragedies as he rises to the imperial throne. Charo B. D'Etcheverry translates a selection of Sagoromo-themed works, highlighting the diversity of medieval Japanese creative practice and the persistent and varied influence of a beloved court tale.Medieval Japanese readers, fascinated by Sagoromo's sorrows and success, were inspired to retell his tale in stories, songs, poetry, and drama. By recontextualizing the tale's poems and writing new libretti, stories, and commentaries about the tale, these medieval aristocrats, warriors, and commoners expressed their competing concerns and ambitions during a chaotic period in Japanese history, as well as their shifting understandings of the tale itself. By translating these creative responses from an era of uncertainty and turmoil, Celebrating Sorrow shows the richness and enduring relevance of Japanese classical and medieval literature.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Rachel Quist specializes in East Asian Buddhist imagery with focuses in pre-modern Japan and China. Her research centers on questions of interaction with imagery, materiality and object agency, and the accessibility of image-based practices. She has written on topics such as Buddhist reliquary design and expressivity, the didactic project underlying the hell tableau at Baodingshan, and the construction of a collective memory surrounding the Shingon monk Kōbō Daishi at the temple complex of Mount Kōya. Rachel is currently conducting research on early imperial patronage of Daigoji, a Shingon temple in Kyoto, for her dissertation.​Michael Van Hartingsveldt received an undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature before teaching in South Korea in at an English immersion school. While there, he became enamored with the religious art of East Asia. He finished a Master’s degree in East Asian art and its markets from Claremont Graduate University in 2017, after which he worked for two years as an Asian Art collections specialist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Michael has collaborated with the Los Angeles office of The Japan Foundation in the curation of three exhibitions and two public lecture series. He now studies at the University of Kansas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

In addition to providing excerpts from classic tales of Japan’s warrior past, Samurai and the Warrior Culture of Japan, 471-1877: A Sourcebook (Hackett, 2022) draws on a wide range of lesser-known but revealing sources—including sword inscriptions, edicts, orders, petitions, and letters—to expand and deepen our understanding of the samurai, from the order’s origins in the fifth century to its abolition in the nineteenth. Taken together with Thomas Donald Conlan's contextualizing introductions and notes, these sources provide a rare window into the experiences, ideals, and daily lives of these now-sentimentalized warriors. Numerous illustrations, a glossary of terms, and a substantial bibliography further enhance the value of this book to students, scholars, and anyone interested in learning more about the samurai.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Haruki Murakami has often been accused of being a feckless, merely popular writer, but in The Existentialist Vision of Haruki Murakami (Cambria Press, 2022) Michael Ackland demonstrates that this is not the case, arguing that Murakami has not only assimilated the existentialist heritage but innovatively changed and revitalized it, thereby placing exciting personal possibilities within the reach of his worldwide readership.Ackland’s study begins by tracing the troubled introduction of such alien conceptions as individualism, democracy and citizens’ rights, and self-interested autonomy into Japan. It argues that Haruki Murakami was seminally exposed to these ideas, and to their modern reconfiguration in French existentialism, during the student protests of the late 1960s, and that the dissent and radicalism of this period has been rechanneled into his fiction.The first two chapters introduce readers to this formative period and to major, recurring concerns in Murakami’s fiction. Then modern existentialism itself is discussed in terms of its philosophical roots in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and of its fictional dramatization in the works of such authors as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka, and finally as it was received in Japan. Usually foreign conceptions undergo considerable recasting in Japan to heighten their relevance and innovative potential. This, too, is a hallmark of Murakami’s adaptations, and part of his virulent critique of Japanese socialization and conformity, which is traced initially in such important short fiction as “The Elephant Vanishes” and “Sleep.”The bulk of this monograph focuses on the place of existentialism in Murakami’s major novels. It argues that much-maligned “Murakami man” actually represents a carefully calculated case of failed or partial socialization, which leaves him ripe for unconventional personal developments, and eventually to become an exemplary existentialist figure. In Japan, according to Murakami, the individual typically becomes a regimented, exhaustively worked foot-soldier of contemporary capitalism, or archetypal salaryman, with the potential for terrible excesses underscored by telling allusions to war atrocities and the holocaust. Or the individual can become a free-thinking agent and vibrant alternative to the Japanese consensual norm. Independent decision-making and action are all important, for as Sartre famously stated, “human freedom precedes essence.” In other words, we make ourselves—how this is possible is explored in three chapters, which examine in succession Murakami’s vision of childhood and formative years, his use of the supernatural and metaphor to disrupt social norms and to radically expand the challenges confronting individuals, and his evolving conception of what constitutes meaningful, accessible existentialist action.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies