Description
Book SynopsisTokyo is a vibrant city where the cultures of the East and the West are remixed into perceptibly Japanese forms. This book traces the cultural and literary history of Tokyo from an obscure fishing village to one of the largest metropolises in the world.
Trade Review'Tokyo's cultural history, which is what Mansfield so splendidly serves us, is a template of its times, and in offering it, this book joins the best. Scholarly but packed, pungent and personal, it gives us the new key to the city.' --Japan Times
Table of Contents* City of Literature, Theatre and Art: The print masters Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro; the Kabuki theatre; authors Nagai Kafu, Tanizaki Junichiro, Mishima Yukio, Murukami Haruki; foreign writers Angela Carter, William Gibson and Donald Richie. * City of Architecture: From the fortifications of Edo Castle, great temples and shrines, via the western hybrids of the Meiji era to the post-modernist skyscrapers, giant neon screens and digitalized surfaces of today's city. * City of Calamities: The great fires of the Edo period; floods, famines and typhoons; the 1923 Earthquake, coups and rising militarism in the 1930s; the fire bombings of the Second World War; the 1995 subway gas attack by members of a death cult and the fatalism of residents living on one of the earth's largest fault lines.
