japanese literature

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Book Subject Tag: Women authors

  • Strange Weather in Tokyo

    Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, “Sensei,” in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him “Sensei” (“Teacher”). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship develops from a perfunctory acknowledgment of each […]

  • Toddler Hunting and Other Stories

    Winner of Japan’s top literary prizes (the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri), Taeko Kono writes with a strange beauty: her tales are pinpricked with disquieting scenes, her characters all teetering on self-dissolution, especially in the context of their intimate relationships. In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls but compulsively buys […]

  • My floating mother, city

    This exciting new collection, My Floating Mother, City, contains poems from Kazuko Shiraishi’s most recent books published in Japan, including The Running of the Full Moon (2004) and My Floating Mother, City (2003), which received the Bansui Poetry Award and a Cultural Award from the Emperor of Japan. Also included here are three amazing long […]

  • Let those who appear

    Over twenty-five years ago New Directions, at the urging of Kenneth Rexroth, published Seasons of Sacred Lust, a selection of poems by a young Japanese writer, Kazuko Shiraishi. Since then the book has gone through several printings and toured around the world, accompanying Ms. Shiraishi to almost any country one can think of, places where she […]

  • The poetry and poetics of ancient Japan

    It was the noblewomen of the 10th and 11th centuries who freed Japanese literature from the domination of formal Chinese writing to create a poetry shaped by spoken Japanese. Many centuries later it was again women, this time courtesans and prostitutes, who through popular song liberated a poetry more and more restricted by increasingly rarified […]

  • Japanese women poets : an anthology

    This anthology encompasses all the major Japanese women poets, over one hundred, arranged chronologically and all the major verse forms: choka, tanka, haikai (haiku), kanshi (verse written in Chinese), and free verse.

  • I am alive : the tanka poems of Goto Miyoko, 1898-1978

  • Moonstone woman : selected poems and prose

  • Rabbits, crabs, etc. : stories by Japanese women

  • The briefcase

    Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, “Sensei” in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him “Sensei” (“Teacher”). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship-traced by Kawakami’s gentle hints at the changing […]