Books in the Harvard East Asian Monographs (HUP) series

Why does literature's voice still seduce us into reading? What is the relationship between ethics and history in the study of literature? These essays on Kawabata Yasunari, Murakami Haruki, Karatani Kjin, Furui Yoshikichi, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Natsume Soseki, and Kobayashi Hideo, visit the force of the scandalous to confront such questions.

What are the possibilities and limits of historical knowledge? This book explores these issues through a study of the Zuozhuan, a foundational text in the Chinese tradition, whose rhetorical and analytical self-consciousness reveals much about the contending ways of thought unfolding during the period of the text's formation.

Kokugaku, or nativism, was an important intellectual movement from the 17th-19th century in Japan, and its worldview remains influential. McNally's primary goal is to restore historicity to the study of nativism by recognizing Atsutane's role in the creation and perpetuation of an enduring intellectual tradition.

This book explores nation and modernity in China by focusing on the work of Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967). Through his literary and aesthetic practice as an essayist, Zhou espoused a way of constructing the individual and affirming the individual's importance in opposition to the normative national subject of most May Fourth reformers.

Facing the Monarch examines the role of rhetoric in shaping the dynamic between Chinese ministers and monarchs in the era between the Spring and Autumn period and the later Han dynasty. Essays analyze classical Chinese works to provide fresh perspectives on the impact of political circumstances on modes of expression.

A Sense of Place examines the vast Kanto region as a locus of cultural identity and an object of familial attachment in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Japan. Using memoirs, letters, travelogues, land registers, and other documents, David Spafford analyzes the relationships of the eastern elites to the space they inhabited.

This study offers a new view of South Korea's transformation since 1960.Focusing on three turning points--the creation of the development state in the 1960s, democratization in 1987, and the 1997 economic crisis--Jongryn Mo and Barry R. Weingast show how Korea sustained growth by resolving crises in favor of greater political and economic openness.

Rojas focuses on visuality and gender tropes to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity. Through detailed readings of narrative works, the study identifies three distinct constellations of visual concerns corresponding to the late imperial, mid-20th century, and contemporary periods.

In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire.

Compiled in 940 at the court of the kingdom of Shu, the Huajian ji is the earliest extant collection of lyrics by literati poets. Shields examines the influence of court culture on the anthology's creation and the significance of imitation and convention in its lyrics, situating the work within larger questions of Chinese literary history.

The sacred mountain Oyama (literally, "Big Mountain") has loomed over the religious landscape of early modern Japan. Ambros provides a narrative history of the mountain and its place in contemporary society and popular religion by focusing on the development of the Oyama cult and its religious, political, and socioeconomic contexts.

Hijiya-Kirschnereit brings a sophisticated and graceful method of analysis to this English translation of her book on the shishosetsu, one of the most important yet misunderstood genres in Japanese literature.

Since the 1950s, Abe Kobo (1924-1993) has achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of literature. Bolton explores how this reconciliation of ideas and dialects is for Abe part of the process whereby texts and individuals form themselves-a search for identity that occurs at the level of the self and society at large.

The first full-length biography of a premodern Japanese nun, The Princess Nun is the story of Bunchi (1619-1697), daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo and founder of Enshoji. The study incorporates issues of gender and social status into its discussion of Bunchi's ascetic practice to rewrite the history of Buddhist reform and Tokugawa religion.

Trent E. Maxey documents how religion came to be seen as the "greatest problem" by the architects of the modern Japanese state. Maxey shows that in Meiji Japan, religion designated a cognitive and social pluralism that resisted direct state control. It also provided the state with a means to contain, regulate, and neutralize that plurality.

Melek Ortabasi reassesses the influence of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), a folk scholar and elite bureaucrat, in shaping modern Japan's cultural identity. Only the second book-length English-language study of Yanagita, this book moves beyond his pioneering work in folk studies to reveal the full range of his contributions as a public intellectual.

Hiraku Shimoda places the origin of modern Japanese regionalism in the tense relationship between region and nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study shows that "region," often seen as a hard, natural place that impedes national unity, is in fact a supple spatial category that can be made to reinforce nationalist sensibilities.

Jun Uchida draws on previously unused materials in multi-language archives to uncover the obscured history of the Japanese civilians who settled in Korea between 1876 and 1945, with particular focus on the first generation of "pioneers" between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated Japan's colonial presence on the Korean peninsula.

Rise of a Japanese Chinatown focuses on a Chinese immigrant community in the Japanese port city of Yokohama from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 to the normalization of Sino-Japanese ties in 1972 and beyond. It tells the story of how Chinese immigrants found an enduring place within a monoethnic state during periods of war and peace.

The outbreak of the "Minamata Disease" in 1950s Japan remains one of the most horrific examples of environmental poisoning in history. Based on primary documents and interviews, this book describes responses to this incidence of mercury poisoning, focusing on the efforts of its victims and their supporters to secure redress.

Natasha Heller offers a cultural history of Buddhism through a case study of the Chan master Zhongfeng Mingben. Monks of his stature developed a broad set of cultural competencies for navigating social and intellectual relationships. Heller shows the importance of situating monks as actors within wider sociocultural fields of practice and exchange.

Chinese martial arts novels from the late nineteenth century are full of suggestive sounds. Characters curse in colorful dialect accents, and action scenes come to life with the loud clash of swords. Paize Keulemans examines the relationship between these novels and earlier storyteller manuscripts to explain the purpose and history of these sounds.

Investing Japan demonstrates that foreign investment is a vital and misunderstood aspect of Japan's modern economic development. This study investigates the role played by foreign companies in the Japanese experience of modernization, highlighting their identity as key agents in the processes of industrialization and technology transfer.

Sukhee Lee posits an alternative understanding of the relationship between the state and social elites during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. Challenging the assumption of a zero-sum competition between the powers of the state and of local elites, Lee shows that state power and local elite interests were mutually constitutive and reinforcing.

Catherine L. Phipps examines a largely unacknowledged system of "special trading ports" that operated under full Japanese jurisdiction in the shadow of the better-known treaty ports. Phipps demonstrates why the special trading ports were key to Japan's achieving autonomy and regional power during the pivotal second half of the nineteenth century.

From the 1910s to the 1940s, a wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the Korean cultural scene with differing agendas but shared demands for equality and social justice. Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture, focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression.

The Korean Economy provides an overview of Korean economic experience since the 1950s, with a focus on the period since democratization in 1987. Chapters analyze the Korean experience from a wide range of economic and social perspectives, as well as describing the country's economic challenges going forward and how they can best be met.