Living Carelessly In Tokyo And Elsewhere

Author : John Nathan
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2008-03-18
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1416593780

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Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere by John Nathan Pdf

John Nathan arrived in Tokyo in 1961 fresh out of Harvard College, bringing with him no practical experience, no more than two connections, no prospects, and little else to recommend him but stoic, unflappable pluck. Japan at that time was still in the shadow of the Occupation, and only a handful of foreigners were studying the country seriously. Two years later, Nathan became the first American to pass the entrance exams to the best school in Japan, the University of Tokyo. He went on to translate two of Japan's greatest contemporary writers, Yukio Mishima and Nobel laureate Kenzaburõ Õe, and direct several series of films in and about Japan in collaboration with world-famous directors and businesses; earn an advanced degree at Harvard and a professorship at Princeton; and become a Hollywood screenwriter. Nathan was given unprecedented access to the inner sanctum of Sony for his book Sony: The Private Life, and he explored the damaged psyche of postbubble Japan in his acclaimed Japan Unbound. During his decades of passionate engagement with Japan, Nathan became close friends with many of the most gifted people in the land -- politicians and business leaders as well as painters, novelists, directors, rock stars, and movie stars -- and was privileged to travel, in their very special company, inside domains of Japanese life not normally open to foreigners then or now. In his unique chronicle of that journey, Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere, he details the adventures sublime, profane, and uproarious, many of a distinctly Japanese nature, that characterized his career, which was singular in its success as much as in its chaos. Along the way, he brings the most exciting era in recent Japanese history vividly into focus with wry humor, penetrating insight, and pathos. John Nathan is not the only foreigner to have developed a rich, full, deeply nuanced understanding of Japan. But his experiences are certainly extraordinary and in fact irreproducible, and his memoir is the most personally satisfying story yet told of Japan (and elsewhere). From Nathan's lifetime of wisdom, compassion, and brazen resolve, we learn the value of traveling within our own mental and emotional borders as well as without the many places we call home.

Author : John Nathan
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 0618138943

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Japan Unbound by John Nathan Pdf

Explores the cultural changes that have taken place in Japan throughout the last decade as demonstrated by various economic groups and institutions, predicting what Japan's changing world role will mean for the future.

Author : Ian Buruma
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2018-03-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781101981429

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A Tokyo Romance by Ian Buruma Pdf

A classic memoir of self-invention in a strange land: Ian Buruma's unflinching account of his amazing journey into the heart of Tokyo's underground culture as a young man in the 1970's When Ian Buruma arrived in Tokyo in 1975, Japan was little more than an idea in his mind, a fantasy of a distant land. A sensitive misfit in the world of his upper middleclass youth, what he longed for wasn’t so much the exotic as the raw, unfiltered humanity he had experienced in Japanese theater performances and films, witnessed in Amsterdam and Paris. One particular theater troupe, directed by a poet of runaways, outsiders, and eccentrics, was especially alluring, more than a little frightening, and completely unforgettable. If Tokyo was anything like his plays, Buruma knew that he had to join the circus as soon as possible. Tokyo was an astonishment. Buruma found a feverish and surreal metropolis where nothing was understated—neon lights, crimson lanterns, Japanese pop, advertising jingles, and cabarets. He encountered a city in the midst of an economic boom where everything seemed new, aside from the isolated temple or shrine that had survived the firestorms and earthquakes that had levelled the city during the past century. History remained in fragments: the shapes of wounded World War II veterans in white kimonos, murky old bars that Mishima had cruised in, and the narrow alleys where street girls had once flitted. Buruma’s Tokyo, though, was a city engaged in a radical transformation. And through his adventures in the world of avant garde theater, his encounters with carnival acts, fashion photographers, and moments on-set with Akira Kurosawa, Buruma underwent a radical transformation of his own. For an outsider, unattached to the cultural burdens placed on the Japanese, this was a place to be truly free. A Tokyo Romance is a portrait of a young artist and the fantastical city that shaped him. With his signature acuity, Ian Buruma brilliantly captures the historical tensions between east and west, the cultural excitement of 1970s Tokyo, and the dilemma of the gaijin in Japanese society, free, yet always on the outside. The result is a timeless story about the desire to transgress boundaries: cultural, artistic, and sexual.

Author : Damian Flanagan
Publisher : Reaktion Books
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2014-08-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781780234199

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Yukio Mishima by Damian Flanagan Pdf

The most internationally acclaimed Japanese author of the twentieth century, Yukio Mishima (1925–70) was a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize. But the prolific author shocked the world in 1970 when he attempted a coup d’état that ended in his suicide by ritual disembowelment. In this radically new analysis of Mishima’s extraordinary life, Damian Flanagan deviates from the stereotypical depiction of a right-wing nationalist and aesthete, presenting the author instead as a man in thrall to the modern world while also plagued by hidden neuroses and childhood trauma that pushed him toward his explosive final act. Flanagan argues that Mishima was a man obsessed with the concepts of time and “emperor,” and reveals how these were at the heart of his literature and life. Untangling the distortions in the writer’s memoirs, Flanagan traces the evolution of Mishima’s attempts to master and transform his sexuality and artistic persona. While often perceived as a solitary protest figure, Mishima, Flanagan shows, was very much in tune with postwar culture—he took up bodybuilding and became a model and actor in the 1950s, adopted the themes of contemporary political scandals in his work, courted English translators, and became influenced by the student protests and hippie subculture of the late 1960s. A groundbreaking reevaluation of the author, this succinct biography paints a revealing portrait of Mishima’s life and work.

Author : Zachary Leader
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 784 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2018-11-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781101875179

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The Life of Saul Bellow by Zachary Leader Pdf

When this second volume of The Life of Saul Bellow opens, Bellow, at forty-nine, is at the pinnacle of American letters - rich, famous, critically acclaimed. The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1, rise; volume 2, fall. Bellow never fell, producing some of his greatest fiction (Mr Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, all his best stories), winning two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. At eighty, he wrote his last story; at eighty-five, he wrote Ravelstein. In this volume, his life away from the desk, including his love life, is if anything more dramatic than in volume 1. In the public sphere, he is embroiled in controversy over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel. Bellow's relations with women were often fraught. In the 1960s he was compulsively promiscuous (even as he inveighed against sexual liberation). The women he pursued, the ones he married and those with whom he had affairs, were intelligent, attractive and strong-willed. At eighty-five he fathered his fourth child, a daughter, with his fifth wife. His three sons, whom he loved, could be as volatile as he was, and their relations with their father were often troubled. Although an early and engaged supporter of civil rights, in the second half of his life Bellow was angered by the excesses of Black Power. An opponent of cultural relativism, he exercised great influence in literary and intellectual circles, advising a host of institutes and foundations, helping those he approved of, hindering those of whom he disapproved. In making his case, he could be cutting and rude; he could also be charming, loyal, and funny. Bellow's heroic energy and will are clear to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost, to himself and others, are also clear.

Author : Zachary Leader
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 818 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2019-12-03
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781101910184

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The Life of Saul Bellow, Volume 2 by Zachary Leader Pdf

The second volume in the life of literary giant Saul Bellow, vividly capturing a personal life that was always tumultuous and career that never ceased being triumphant. Bellow, at forty-nine, is at the pinnacle of American letters--rich, famous, critically acclaimed. The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1, rise; volume 2, fall. Bellow never fell, producing in the latter half of his life some of his greatest fiction (Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift), winning two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. At eighty, he wrote his last story; at eighty-five, he wrote Ravelstein. In this volume, his life away from the desk, including his love life, is if anything more dramatic than in the first. In the public sphere, he is embroiled in controversy over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel. In this stunning second volume, Zachary Leader shows that Bellow's heroic energy and will were present to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost, to himself and others, continue to be worth the examination of this vivid work of literary scholarship.

Author : John Nathan
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2011-03-30
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781456857509

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A Bintel Brif by John Nathan Pdf

Author : Jonathan Wroot
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2021-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781793601223

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The Paths of Zatoichi by Jonathan Wroot Pdf

The Paths of Zatoichi charts the history and continuing influence of the Japanese film and TV franchise about Zatoichi the blind swordsman, both within the Japanese media industriesand within global popular culture.

Author : Rudolf Freiburg,Gerd Bayer
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2021-12-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783030834227

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The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture by Rudolf Freiburg,Gerd Bayer Pdf

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture delves into the complex problems involved in all attempts to survive. The essays analyze survival in contemporary prose narratives, short stories, poems, dramas, and theoretical texts, but also in films and other modes of cultural practices. Addressing diverse topics such as memory and forgetting in Holocaust narratives, stories of refugees and asylum seekers, and representations of war, the ethical implications involved in survival in texts and media are brought into a transnational critical discussion. The volume will be of potential interest to a wide range of critics working on ethical issues, the body, and the politics of art and literature.

Author : James King
Publisher : John Hunt Publishing
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2012-02-24
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781780990491

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Under Foreign Eyes by James King Pdf

This book is about the perception of Japan in the sixty films set there by gaijin (foreigners) —outsiders who almost always do not speak or read Japanese. My area of attention is directed to films depicting post World War II Japan and the Japanese, and, in many cases, films showing how foreigners in the same time frame respond to Japan. Why have a substantial number of films been set there by strangers? As a body of work, what do they tell us about contemporary Japan and about cinema? These films certainly provide a new cultural history of the West’s reaction to Japan, but, even more, they are constructions that demonstrate how the West gazes at Japan. As such, more information can often be derived about the onlookers as on those looked-upon. ,

Author : John Nathan
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2018-05-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780231546973

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Sōseki by John Nathan Pdf

Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) was the father of the modern novel in Japan, chronicling the plight of bourgeois characters caught between familiar modes of living and the onslaught of Western values and conventions. Yet even though generations of Japanese high school students have been expected to memorize passages from his novels and he is routinely voted the most important Japanese writer in national polls, he remains less familiar to Western readers than authors such as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima. In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Sōseki’s complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Sōseki’s groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Sōseki’s fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer’s life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author. The first full-length study of Sōseki in fifty years, Nathan’s biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated the modernism of the twentieth century.

Author : Jukichi Inouye
Publisher : [s.l. : s.n.], 1910 (Tokyo : Tokyo Print. Company)
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 1910
Category : Tokyo (Japan)
ISBN : STANFORD:36105041520144

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Home Life in Tokyo by Jukichi Inouye Pdf

Author : John Whittier Treat
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2018-04-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226545271

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The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature by John Whittier Treat Pdf

The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature tells the story of Japanese literature from its start in the 1870s against the backdrop of a rapidly coalescing modern nation to the present. John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and pays special attention to the Japanese state’s hand in shaping literature throughout the country’s nineteenth-century industrialization, a half-century of empire and war, its post-1945 reconstruction, and the challenges of the twenty-first century to modern nationhood. Beginning with journalistic accounts of female criminals in the aftermath of the Meiji civil war, Treat moves on to explore how woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyō’s stories engaged with modern liberal economics, sex work, and marriage; credits Natsume Sōseki’s satire I Am a Cat with the triumph of print over orality in the early twentieth century; and links narcissism in the visual arts with that of the Japanese I-novel on the eve of the country’s turn to militarism in the 1930s. From imperialism to Americanization and the new media of television and manga, from boogie-woogie music to Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, Treat traces the stories Japanese audiences expected literature to tell and those they did not. The book concludes with a classic of Japanese science fiction a description of present-day crises writers face in a Japan hobbled by a changing economy and unprecedented natural and manmade catastrophes. The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature reinterprets the “end of literature”—a phrase heard often in Japan—as a clarion call to understand how literary culture worldwide now teeters on a historic precipice, one at which Japan’s writers may have arrived just a moment before the rest of us.

Author : Donald Keene
Publisher : Kodansha Globe
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Biografier
ISBN : UVA:X004048801

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On Familiar Terms by Donald Keene Pdf

This is the intimate and inspiring story of one of the truly great cosmopolitans of our time. During an exceptional career spanning five decades, Donald Keene has brought the works of Japan's greatest writers to worldwide attention through his highly acclaimed writings, translations, and anthologies. On Familiar Terms is the deeply personal story of his remarkable life - from a Depression-era childhood through his wartime experiences as a naval intelligence officer in the Pacific, his early enchantment with the now-vanished world of old Kyoto, and the diverse and lasting friendships he made in New York, Japan, and England. In this poignant and engaging portrait of intellectual, spiritual, and personal growth, Donald Keene recalls his lifelong journey, including fascinating relationships with and illuminating anecdotes about such writers as Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe, and Kobo Abe. This is a story of universal interest, of self-discovery among shifting cultural boundaries, and the making of a committed internationalist against the backdrop of a complex and restless world.

Author : Haruki Murakami
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2010-08-11
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307762733

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The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami Pdf

In the tales that make up The Elephant Vanishes, the imaginative genius that has made Haruki Murakami an international superstar is on full display. In these stories, a man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald’s in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard. By turns haunting and hilarious, in The Elephant Vanishes Murakami crosses the border between separate realities—and comes back bearing remarkable treasures. Includes the story "Barn Burning," which is the basis for the major motion picture Burning.