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Beautiful Star (Paperback)
Yukio Mishima; Translated by Stephen Dodd
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R310
R253
Discovery Miles 2 530
Save R57 (18%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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'Interplanetary, quite extraordinary . . . awash with dark humour
and scenes of intense beauty' Financial Times 'One of the greatest
avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century' New Yorker
Beautiful Star is a 1962 tale of family, love, nuclear war and
UFOs, and was considered by Mishima to be one of his very best
books. Translated into English for the first time, this atmospheric
black comedy tells the story of the Osugi family, who come to the
sudden realization that each of them hails from a different planet:
Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and
daughter from Venus. This extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them
closer together, and convinces them that they have a mission: to
find others of their kind, and save humanity from the imminent
threat of the atomic bomb...
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Life for Sale (Paperback)
Yukio Mishima; Translated by Stephen Dodd
1
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R305
R247
Discovery Miles 2 470
Save R58 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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'The best book I've read this year ... darkly comedic and full of
tension and surprise' Marina Abramovic 'Life for sale. Use me as
you wish. I am a twenty-seven-year-old male. Discretion guaranteed.
Will cause no bother at all.' When Hanio Yamada realises the future
holds little of worth to him, he puts his life for sale in a Tokyo
newspaper, thus unleashing a series of unimaginable exploits. A
world of murderous mobsters, hidden cameras, a vampire woman,
poisoned carrots, code-breaking, a hopeless junkie heiress and
makeshift explosives reveals itself to the unwitting hero. Is there
nothing he can do to stop it? Resolving to follow the orders of his
would-be purchasers, he comes to understand what life is worth, and
whether we can indeed name our price.
This book examines the development of Japanese literature depicting
the native place ("furusato") from the mid-Meiji period through the
late 1930s as a way of articulating the uprootedness and sense of
loss many experienced as Japan modernized. The 1890s witnessed the
appearance of fictional works describing a city dweller who returns
to his native place, where he reflects on the evils of urban life
and the idyllic past of his childhood home. The book concentrates
on four authors who typify this trend: Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki
T'son, Sat' Haruo, and Shiga Naoya.
All four writers may be understood as trying to make sense of
contemporary Japan. Their works reflect their engagement with the
social, intellectual, economic, and technological discourses that
created a network of shared experience among people of a similar
age. This common experience allows the author to chart how these
writers' works contributed to the general debate over Japanese
national identity in this period. By exploring the links between
"furusato" literature and the theme of national identity, he shows
that the debate over a common language that might "transparently"
express the modern experience helped shape a variety of literary
forms used to present the native place as a distinctly Japanese
experience.
When he died from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one, Kajii
Motojir? had written only twenty short stories. Yet his life and
work, it is argued here, sheds light on a significant moment in
Japanese history and, ultimately, adds to our understanding of how
modern Japanese identity developed. By the time Kajii began to
write in the mid-1920s there was heated debate among his peers over
“legitimate” forms of literary expression: Japanese Romantics
questioned the value of a western-inspired version of modernity;
others were influenced by Marxist proletarian literature or
modernist experimentation; still others tried to create a
distinctly Japanese fictional style that concentrated on
first-person perspective, the so-called “I-novel.” There was a
general sense that Japan needed to reinvent itself, but writers and
artists were at odds over what form this reinvention should take.
Throughout his career, Kajii drew from these various camps but
belonged to none of them, making his work an invaluable indicator
of a culture in crisis and transition. The Youth of Things is the
first full-length book devoted to Kajii Motojir?. It brings
together English translations of nearly all his completed stories
with an analysis of his literature in the context of several major
themes that locate him in 1920s Japan. In particular, Dodd links
the writer’s work with the physical body: Kajii’s subjective
literary presence was grounded first and foremost in his
TB-stricken physical body, hence one cannot be studied without the
other. His concerns with health and mortality drove him to play a
central role in constructing a language for modern literature and
to offer new insights into ideas that intrigued so many other
Taish? intellectuals and writers. In addition, Kajii’s early
years as a writer were strongly influenced by the cosmopolitan
humanism of the White Birch (Shirakaba) school, but by the time his
final work was published in the early 1930s, an environment of
greater cultural introspection was beginning to take root,
encapsulated in the expression “return to Japan” (nihon kaiki).
Only a few years separate these two moments in time, but they
represent a profound shift in the aspirations and expectations of a
whole generation of writers. Through a study of Kajii’s writing,
this book offers some sense of the demise of one cultural moment
and the creation of another.
When he died from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one, Kajii
Motojir_ had written only twenty short stories. Yet his life and
work, it is argued here, sheds light on a significant moment in
Japanese history and, ultimately, adds to our understanding of how
modern Japanese identity developed. By the time Kajii began to
write in the mid-1920s there was heated debate among his peers over
OlegitimateO forms of literary expression: Japanese Romantics
questioned the value of a western-inspired version of modernity;
others were influenced by Marxist proletarian literature or
modernist experimentation; still others tried to create a
distinctly Japanese fictional style that concentrated on
first-person perspective, the so-called OI-novel.O There was a
general sense that Japan needed to reinvent itself, but writers and
artists were at odds over what form this reinvention should take.
The Youth of Things is the first full-length book devoted to_ Kajii
Motojir_. It brings together English translations of nearly_all his
completed stories with an analysis of his literature in the context
of several major themes that locate him in 1920s Japan._ In
particular, Dodd links the writer's work with the physical body:
Kajii's subjective literary presence was grounded first and
foremost in his TB-stricken physical body, hence one cannot be
studied with- out the other. His concerns with health and mortality
drove him to play a central role in constructing a language for
modern literature and to offer new insights into ideas that
intrigued so many other Taish_ intellectuals and writers. In
addition, Kajii's early years as a writer were strongly influenced
by the cosmopolitan humanism of the White Birch (Shirakaba) school,
but by the time his final work was published in the early 1930s, an
environment of greater cultural introspection was beginning to take
root. This book offers some sense of the demise of one cultural
moment and the creation of another.
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