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By considering \"subjective\" literature to be a \"factual story\" that transforms existence into a conscience and biography into a destiny, the present study focuses on the memoir The Story of My Life, written by Marie, Queen of Romania (18751938), translated into Romanian and published between 1934 and 1936. In order to favour a dialogue with history, the narrator, as a credible witness to history, by raising the great issue of the meaning of History to the level of the personal story, slides across the borders between the narrative texts claimed by the \"biographical\" genre and the memories give way to journal-type insertions that are autobiographical in nature. As an apologetic discourse, a historical story and an anthropological act that can resuscitate the mythical thinking, this memoir is also the space of a hermeneutical fiction in which different interpretations of the text can be identified: intentio auctoris, intentio operis and intentio lectoris. However, we will also support the interpretive conjecture of the retrospective narration with an applied poetical analysis, in order to identify and decrypt the autobiographical pact, the historical pact and the reading pact. By entering the field of literarity through a \"quota of aesthetics\" conditioned by the circumstances, the discourse of the factual story The Story of my Life realises and favours the relation between the time lived and the time of the confession-narration or, in other words, between scribing history (the narrative past) and de-scribing history (the commenting present).

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.

Filtered by the literary-artistic imagination, nature and the cycle of seasons represent a central theme in the classical literary and visual Japanese culture, known as ... (Setsugekka), or as the theme of seasons changing, a metonymical wording for the beauty of each season. Since the uniqueness of a work of art implies its identification by anchoring it in the context of a tradition, beginning from the Setsugekka theme, the present study aims to circumscribe the imaginary of winter in the novel Snow Country (··· - Yuki guni, 1935-1937/ 1948), by Yasunari Kawabata. As in a (musical) canon across time, in the postmodern context that suspends the borders between the 'high brow' culture and the 'low brow' culture, between the original and the copy, the novel Snow Country appears in manga form in 2010, with drawings by illustrator Sakuko Utsugi, thus offering a particular re-reading, an 'inter-semiotic translation\" of the original text. The present study goes on to analyse the specific vocabulary through which the 'iconography' of winter is created in the komikku version of the novel, and to identify the means by which it aims to configure the psychological states and the emotions of the characters. Due to his acute sense of the seasons, through his novel, Yasunari Kawabata succeeds in completing the traditional list of famous places (meisho) associated with the motif of winter in Japan, with the snow country from Echigo.

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).

The present study debates the way in which the Japanese author uniquely re-semanticises old Japanese aesthetic concepts such as mono no aware ('the beauty of simple and transient things') or yugenbi ('mysterious beauty'), by exploiting the valences of sight, in an interdisciplinary analysis where the poetic perspective and that of cultural semiotics is foremost. If touch, taste, smell and kinesthetic sense are senses centred on the body, which privilege direct, unmediated contact, it is acknowledged that hearing and seeing are senses that imply distance and perspective. Harnessing this characteristic of the optical, the Neo-Perceptionalist Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1970), in his novel House of the Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru bijo, 1961), transforms sight into a narrative technique that tries to re-sacralise the real world. A millennium after the The Tale of Genji, the first Japanese novel, signed by Murasaki Shikibu, in which the ideal of pure beauty was given by the faceless woman, reduced to long hair and 12 layered kimonos (junihitoe), the nude and sleeping female body in House of the Sleeping Beauties becomes the transient moment of pure beauty in what the Japanese woodblock print calls \"the floating world\" (ukiyo) or the infinite variety of an ephemeral world. In a house of pleasures where elderly clients either dream pleasantly or remember their youth during the nights they spend next to (drugged) sleeping maidens, old Eguchi, who delights in contemplating the sleeping beauties' bodies, finding himself somewhere between mystery and voluptuous fantasy, gains \"the last gaze\". Before fading away, it captures the image (imago) and the icon (eikon) of impermanent things, changing them into purity and beauty.

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.