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In a world overwhelmed by emerging technologies, in which the idea that humanity has lost its \"authenticity\" is increasingly more widespread, the literary narration that explores the territories beyond the \"human\" realm becomes an excellent laboratory for conducting observations on the posthuman concerns. Thus, in the final wave of the contemporary Japanese literature - covering the first two decades of the 21st century (2001-2021) -, seven novels have the word neko ('cat', 'tomcat') in their titles, written by Takashi Hiraide, Yöko Ogawa, Genki Kawamura, Makoto Shinkai, Naruki Nakagawa, Hiro Arikawa, Sosuke Natsukawa. These Japanese novels have been translated into several dozens of languages, circling the globe and encountering, in their path, other books dedicated to the aforementioned feline. The present study aims to analyse these Japanese postmodern narrations from a zoopoetic-hermeneutic angle and to emphasise the cat-character's role as the social marker of a \"private space\" shared by the human and his animal companion - which, naturally, is part of the \"public space\" of society -, connected to the present time of postmodern contemporaneity, as a means for \"survival\" in an alienated urban world. As part of an obvious intertextuality, the cat-character seems to dominate the gallery of non-human animal characters from the contemporary Japanese literature. Postmodernity, by its own means, adds to the study of the relation between the human animal and the non-human animal, which has previously been approached predominantly from an anthropological or a cultural-historical angle.

The book is an academic work addressed to beginners in the study of the Japanese language, literature and art, as well as to those fascinated by Japanese culture or by the secrets of Japanese calligraphy in particular. The book combines, in an exciting and unique way, a theoretical analysis with the practice of calligraphy. In short, the book highlights the 'process of becoming' on the path of Japanese calligraphy, harmoniously reuniting the perspective of an external, distant, abstract view, with a subjective, practical, internal one. Because the author studied this art under the guidance of Japanese masters, the book also contains the author's Japanese calligraphy works. Today, in the digital age, this book on Japanese calligraphy emphasizes the creative synergy of handwriting, through which the calm swiftness of the brush movement in a moment of concentration, attention and freedom, reveals a contemplative mental act. The book is, eventually, an inner journey on the path of Japanese calligraphy, as it combines the practice and theory of calligraphic art, rediscovering handwriting through the reveries of the calligraphy brush in the contemporary digital age: writing by painting and painting by writing.

The present study aims to analyse the novel The Sound of the Mountain ... Yama no oto, 1949-1954), by Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), beginning with a storytelling image, or an image that automatically produces a story. The image under scrutiny is auditory, an image of a mysterious, strongly affective intimacy, which sets the narrative tone and generates the function of the unreal (in the sense that follows Bachelard's view) and, implicitly, of the imagination (which truly stimulates the psyche), in an obvious opposition with the function of the real. By regarding the Japanese novel as an internal narration with a \"limited\" viewpoint, given by the actorial narrative type, since the centre for orientation coincides with the narrative perspective of an actor playing the role of a nucleus-character with a dynamic psychology, the present paper aims to explain, from a poetic and hermeneutic perspective, the meaning of the text beginning from the surface level that hides another view beneath. Moreover, in the case of the Japanese writer in question, the study highlights the search for the appropriate linguistic expression meant to depict the dual appearance of the perceptions, sensations, emotions and ideas that are, on the one hand, clear, precise, but impersonal and, on the other hand, confused, mobile and inexpressible, revealing the means by which Kawabata sometimes tries to extract the abstract from the concreteness of words, in order to give them a purer meaning. Furthermore, by contextualising within the field of Kawabata's literature, the narrative plot of the novel The Sound of the Mountain, which is seemingly devoid of intrigue, climax and denouement, i outlined a narrative technique that i would call a linked novel, an architectonic construction that covers Yasunari Kawabata's entire literary creation, through which the author simultaneously reveals and hides himself, while offering reading and interpretation keys for his works.

The present study aims to emphasise the particularities of the unique literary style used by Sei Shōnagon in the classic masterpiece The Pillow Book, a prose genre (zuihitsu) that combines the journal-memoire type notes and the catalogue-type lists with poetry and anecdotal recounts. As a miscellanea of contemplative meditations triggered by day-to-day experiences or by uncensored associations of random ideas, The Pillow Book reveals Sei Shōnagon as the author of the narration and as a direct participant in the recounted events. By using an unprecedented narrative technique, The Pillow Book contains approximately 300 paragraphs of different lengths (dan), some bearing separate subtitles, in a rhythmic three-part structure that transforms this type of prose into a dynamic text in which the imperial court, the individual and nature are, for the writer, a spectacle that needs to be revealed in and through words. Our analysis aims to argue the particular means by which Sei Shōnagon continuously explores not only the individual creativity, but also the (direct or indirect) poetic potential of the word, by revealing the miraculous presence of the word, in its multiple valences, in the representation of the universe: the word as a decorative element, but also as a world creator (utamakura, makura kotoba, kotodama).

With the ternary relationship of influence and cooperation between sign, object, and its interpreter in the semiotic rapport as a starting point, the present study aims to capture the \"productive tension\" of semiotics and communication in the Japanese advertising discourse. The advertisement, considered a semiotic system which ranks the fundamental functions of language in a particular manner, searches for new methods of communication, of message production, directing the sign towards the symbolic space of communication. In trying to measure this symbolic fund of mass communication, the following text wishes to argue, from the perspective of rhetoric and cultural semiotics, that in the Japanese advertising message which is not transmitted mechanically between speaker and listener, one may recognise a model of impressiveness (impact marketing) alongside a model of stimulation (affect and passion) or of insertion (clandestine persuasion and subliminal power). Also, calling on \"syncretic\" semiotics, this research devoted to the Japanese advertising discourse wishes to probe the way in which meaning is constructed through the act of signification resulted from the interaction of the verbal sentence with procedures and strategies that manifest themselves in several types of language, such as the visual, auditory, gestural, etc.

The present study is a hermeneutical analysis of the primary meanings (signa propria) and the secondary meanings (signa translata) in the novel Suflet japonez (Japanese Soul) (published in 1937 and republished in 2004), written by General Gheorghe Băgulescu (1890-1973), an interwar diplomat and a writer with an impressive reputation. Given the fact that the hermeneutical mechanism can define the aesthetic value of a text, by trying to capture a final meaning (if there is one), the present study wishes to explore the cohesion of the narrative unity in this historical novel, which was well known at the time but has now been forgotten. My interest was for the Romanian author's motivation for his choice of a subject, for the first time in Romanian, of the Japanese legend (chūshingura) of the 47 ronin (wandering samurai with no lord or master) who end their lives after they had avenged their master who had been condemned to death through cunning schemes, a theme that has bestirred great interest in Japan and worldwide. The present analysis tries to explore the means through which Gheorghe Băgulescu approached this subject, by questioning whether this historical novel (published before James Cavell's Shogun in 1975) managed to surpass the pattern-situations, in order to create an original literary space.

By exploiting a bio-bibliographical team research, this article is an analytical study of literary history centered on translations of Japanese literature into the Romanian language. A history of Japanese literary translations from the Romanian space in the 20th century, which signals editorial appearances considered \"cultural act\" through a commentary of literary interpretation, the study archives translations published in volumes and periodicals, based on three categories of genre: prose, poetry, dramaturgy. Trying an angle of perception of translation from a historical-cultural perspective, the study also highlights the political and diplomatic \"ambience\" of the time, the generating cultural and sociolinguistic context that favored or prevented the emergence of translations of Japanese literature on the Romanian market, in order to understand the depths and the complexity of the phenomenon. As a page of literary history, this investigation (with four complementary annexes), which combines a panoramic view with one focused on Japanese literary translations, can also be read as a retrospective of a centennial of Romanian-Japanese cultural diplomacy, as a vehicle of sense and aesthetic value from one language to another, as a way of access to another culture, legitimizing a possible chance of synchronization with universality.