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"Japanese literature -- Christian authors -- History and criticism"
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Handbook of Japanese Christian Writers
Although a century and a half of Christian proselytizing has only led to the conversion of about one percent of the Japanese population, the proportion of writers who have either been baptized or significantly influenced in their work by Christian teachings is much higher. The seventeen authors examined in this volume have all employed themes and imagery in their writings influenced by Christian teachings. Those writing between the 1880s and the start of World War II were largely drawn to the Protestant emphasis on individual freedom, though many of them eventually rejected sectarian affiliation. Since 1945, on the other hand, Catholicism has produced a number of religiously committed authors, led by figures such as Endo Shusaku, the most popular and influential Christian writer in Japan to date. The authors discussed in these essays have contributed in a variety of ways to the indigenization of the imported religion.
eBook
The Dilemma of Faith in Modern Japanese Literature
iThe first book-length study to explore the links between Christianity and modern Japanese literature, this book analyzes the process of conversion of nine canonical authors, unveiling the influence that Christianity had on their self-construction, their oeuvre and, ultimately, the trajectory of modern Japanese literature.
Building significantly on previous research, which has treated the intersections of Christianity with the Japanese literary world in only a cursory fashion, this book emphasizes the need to make a clear distinction between the different roles played by Catholicism and Protestantism. In particular, it argues that most Meiji and Taishō intellectuals were exposed to an exclusively Protestant and mainly Calvinist derivation of Christianity and so it is against this worldview that the connections between the two ought to be assessed. Examining the work of authors such as Kitamura Tōkoku, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Nagayo Yoshirō, this book also contextualizes the spread of Christianity in Japan and challenges the notion that Christian thought was in conflict with mainstream literary schools. As such, this book explains how the dualities experienced by many modern writers were in fact the manifestation of manifold developments that placed Christianity at the center, rather than at the periphery, of their process of self-construction.
The Dilemma of Faith in Modern Japanese Literature will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese modern literature, as well as those interested in Religious Studies and Japanese Studies more generally.
eBook
Women adrift : the literature of Japan's imperial body
Womens bodies contributed to the expansion of the Japanese empire. With this bold opening, Noriko J. Horiguchi sets out in Women Adrift to show how womens actions and representations of womens bodies redrew the border and expanded, rather than transcended, the empire of Japan. Discussions of empire building in Japan routinely employ the idea of kokutaithe national bodyas a way of conceptualizing Japan as a nation-state. Women Adrift demonstrates how women impacted this notion, and how womens actions affected perceptions of the national body. Horiguchi broadens the debate over Japanese womens agency by focusing on works that move between naichi, the inner territory of the empire of Japan, and gaichi, the outer territory; specifically, she analyzes the boundary-crossing writings of three prominent female authors: Yosano Akiko (18781942), Tamura Toshiko (18841945), and Hayashi Fumiko (19041951). In these examplesand in Naruse Mikios postwar film adaptations of Hayashis workHoriguchi reveals how these writers asserted their own agency by transgressing the borders of nation and gender. At the same time, we see how their work, conducted under various colonial conditions, ended up reinforcing Japanese nationalism, racialism, and imperial expansion. In her reappraisal of the paradoxical positions of these women writers, Horiguchi complicates narratives of Japanese empire and of womens role in its expansion.
eBook
Lafcadio Hearn and Christianity
While anti-Christian sentiment characterizes Lafcadio Hearn's earliest writings, he refrained from expressing these sentiments while staying in the US. Hearn's treatment of Christianity in his writings and letters is examined.
Journal Article