New Books in 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Shugendō and Mount Togakushi (U Hawaii Press, 2022), Caleb Carter challenges this conceptualization by examining historical documents of Mount Togakushi.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

Nitobe Inazō wanted to explain Japan to Westerners, particularly morality as it is taught in Japanese society. He was born a Samurai in 1862. In his book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Inazō Nitobe explains the moral foundations of traditional Japanese society to a Western audience through “the way of the warrior,” Bushido. Harvard Professor David Howell is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History and Professor of History at Harvard University and the Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He’s also author of the books Capitalism from Within and Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

Queer Transfigurations: Boys Love Media in Asia (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022), edited by James Welker, brings together twenty-one scholars exploring BL media, its fans, and its sociocultural impacts in a dozen countries in East, Southeast, and South Asia—and beyond. Contributors draw on their expertise in an array of disciplines and fields, including anthropology, fan studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, political science, and sociology to shed light on BL media and its fandoms.The boys love (BL) genre was created for girls and women by young female manga (comic) artists in early 1970s Japan to challenge oppressive gender and sexual norms. Over the years, BL has seen almost irrepressible growth in popularity and since the 2000s has become a global media phenomenon, weaving its way into anime, prose fiction, live-action dramas, video games, audio dramas, and fan works. BL’s male–male romantic and sexual relationships have found a particularly receptive home in other parts of Asia, where strong local fan communities and locally produced BL works have garnered a following throughout the region, taking on new meanings and engendering widespread cultural effects.Queer Transfigurations reveals the far-reaching influences of the BL genre, demonstrating that it is truly transnational and transcultural in diverse cultural contexts. It has also helped bring about positive changes in the status of LGBT(Q) people and communities as well as enlighten local understandings of gender and sexuality throughout Asia. Queer Transfigurations shows that, some fifty years after the first BL manga appeared in print, the genre is continuing to reverberate and transform lives.James Welker is a professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural Studies, Kanagawa University, Yokohama, Japan. His research focuses primarily on gender and sexuality in postwar and contemporary Japan, especially fan cultures, feminisms, and the LGBT(Q) community. He is the author of Transfigurations: Redefining Women in Late Twentieth-Century Japan (forthcoming).Linshan Jiang is Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also obtained a Ph.D. emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies

The twelve chapters of Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia (U Hawai’i Press, 2020) are divided into three sections: Good Foods, Bad Foods, and Moral Foods. Using case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia, these chapters investigate the moralization of food in modern Asia. These studies on moral food regimes are highly specific, but their implications, especially about the malleability of food as an object of moralization, are far reaching. The first chapter in Good Foods, by Francesca Bray, examines the construction of rice as a symbol of self in Japan and Malaysia. Jia-Chen Fu’s contribution looks at the “goodness” of soymilk in China. Izumi Nakayama’s work is about the emergence of breastmilk as a “good food” in Meiji-period Japan. Finally, Michael Liu writes about Chinese experimentation with nutrition during WWII. David Arnold’s chapter on moral foods―especially rice―in India during the period of British colonial rule begins the second section on “bad” and even “dangerous” foods. The other three chapters in this section address bad foods in South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong, respectively. Tae-Ho Kim looks at discourses on rice, barley, and wheat in modern South Korea. Tatsuya Mitsuda writes on the creation of badness around sweet confections in Japan. Finally, Robert Peckham examines bad foods in the context of British colonial public health programs in Hong Kong. In the final section, Lawrence Zhang shows how changing visions of the health and morality of tea track with geopolitical, cultural, and scientific developments in the modern relations between East Asia and the West. Angela Ki Che Leung’s looks at the modern reinterpretation of vegetarianism in China. Volker Scheid also looks at China, specifically at the reconstitution of traditional Chinese medicinal knowledge and practice. Finally, Hilary Smith’s chapter tackles the moral meanings that accrued to milk in modern China. Each of these chapters shares the volume’s overall interest in both the moral regimes of food in the context of modern nation-building and the bodies and lives of consumers.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/japanese-studies