Description
Book SynopsisThis collection brings together fifteen chapters written by scholars specializing in disciplines ranging from anthropology and sociology to literature, film, and performance studies. These scholars analyze complex questions about how the body is lived and imagined as a locus of meaning-making in contemporary Japan. Exploring such topics as mind-body dualism, aging and illness, spirit possession, beauty, performance, and gender, this collection addresses the wide array of socio-cultural and literary contexts in which the body is interpreted in Japanese culture and thought.
Trade ReviewThe body functions not only as a ground for the unique particularities of individual subjectivity, but also as a model of universality that mirrors the community and the society at large. Through this connection between the individual and the whole, the body thereby gives physical shape to the universal order and its microcosmos, while likewise serving in modern society as the political “field” through which the conflicts and contradictions between the two become visible. It is the nature of this “field” of body politics that Irina Holca and Carmen Săpunaru Tămaş illuminate in their exploration of the varying representations of the body across contemporary Japanese literature, performance, and popular culture. -- Hideto Tsuboi, International Research Center for Japanese Studies
This edited volume is a fresh and very rich addition to our understanding of a crucial topic—the body—as thought, felt, and acted by contemporary Japanese. It will enrich the field beyond Japanese studies, since it brings together two important elements; in addition to familiar names in Japanese studies, the editors—both Romanians with Ph.D.s from Japanese universities—have included authors from highly diverse backgrounds, and their ‘ethnographies’ engage with literature, performing arts, and everyday behaviors, rather than only social science materials. -- Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, University of Wisconsin
This is a refreshing collection of articles addressing the subject of the body from a variety of appealingly eclectic angles. Drawing on less well-known insights gathered by social and cultural anthropologists as well as literature scholars, the chapters offer surprise after surprise—approaches that bewilder the boundaries between human, animal, and spirit, and that amuse as well as inform. This is highly recommended for anyone interested in learning more about Japan's cultural creativity. -- Joy Hendry, Oxford Brookes University
Table of ContentsPart I: The Performed Body
Chapter One: A Japanese Fox in a Woman’s Body: Shifting Performances of Femininity in Kij Johnson’s Reworking of Konjaku Monogatari
Luciana Cardi
Chapter Two: Call Me a Dog. Feeling (Inugami) Possession in Contemporary Tokushima Prefecture
Andrea De Antoni
Chapter Three: Kabuki: Performance of Gendered Bodies
Galia Todorova Gabrovska
Chapter Four: Home Is Where Mother Is, and the Way to a Man’s Heart Goes through His Stomach: Bodies in the Kitchen (Yoshimoto Banana)
Irina Holca
Chapter Five: The Body as Canvas: Osaka Drag Queens from Kabuki to Lady Gaga
Carmen Săpunaru Tămaș
Part II: The De-formed Body
Chapter Six: The Body in Motion in Butō: Passivity and Transformation in the Flesh
Caitlin Coker
Chapter Seven: Senility and the Body: Care and Gender in Contemporary Japanese Literature
Shun Izutani
Chapter Eight: The Cared for Dog and the Caring Dog: Ethical Possibilities in Rieko Matsuura’s Kenshin
Kayo Takeuchi
Chapter Nine: Pricking Pain Surrounds Us: Restraining, Shaping, and Taming the Body in Hebi ni Piasu
Emerald L. King
Chapter Ten: Literature as Social Activism and Reconciliation: Survivors’ Writing and the Meaning of Hansen’s Disease in Japan after 1950
Kathryn Tanaka
Chapter Eleven: The Bald and the Beautiful: Perspectives on Baldness in Contemporary Japan
Adrian O. Tămaș
Part III: The Conformed Body
Chapter Twelve: The Asian Body in the North American Context: Visual and Literary Racialization
Alina E. Anton
Chapter Thirteen: Bodies in the Dark: The Postwar Cinema Audience and the Body as ‘Ground Zero’
Jennifer Coates
Chapter Fourteen: The Confined Body in Ogawa Yōko’s The Ring Finger: A Beguiling Journey towards “Self-discovery”
Kayo Sasao
Chapter Fifteen: Bodies of Onna-no-ko: The Case of a Sex Establishment in Tokyo, Japan
Yoko Kumada
