...Shu Kuge Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press 2007 Politics of Doodling: Tamura Toshiko’s “A Woman Writer” Shu Kuge In “A Woman Writer” (“Onna sakusha,” 1913), probably Tamura Toshiko’s best-known short story, it is odd that, despite the title...

...Peng Hsiao-yen This article centers on Zhu Tianwen, Zhu Tianxin, and Zhang Dachun, writers who were born and brought up in the “solders' villages” and have cultivated a condition of marginality that allows them to position themselves as nonbelievers—those who question the truth of any totalizing...

...Sunyoung Park In the early 1930s, a new group of women writers with a leftist inclination emerged on the Korean literary scene. Some critics have questioned the feminist commitment of these writers, suggesting that their works may have subordinated the cause of women's liberation to that of a...

... with a number of radical (often Christian) right-wing nationalists, taking a harshly anti-Soviet stance. In the world of literary imagination, however, the images of Russia and Russians offered by the writers of different ideological and political backgrounds were often converging. This essay shows...

...Daniel McKay In 1926 a new shipping route was established between Durban and Osaka, on which Laurens van der Post and William Plomer, fresh from their collaboration as writers for the literary magazine Voorslag , embarked as privileged passengers. The opportunity to reside in Japan would exercise a...

...Ben Tran This essay examines the cultural translation of the Western first-person grammatical category into Vietnamese literature during French colonial rule. In the 1930s, Vietnamese writers began to assimilate the first-person pronoun “ tôi ” into their writing. The prevalence of tôi suggests a...

...Cindi Textor This article considers the politics of representing “Korea” in Japanese-language texts, focusing specifically on the work of “Zainichi” writer Kim Sŏkpŏm (1925–). The author begins by identifying parallels between what Kim calls “the spellbinding of language” ( kotoba no jubaku ) and...

... nation with burgeoning writings of a new historiography, particularly in the literary field. Writers have re-created scenes and the effects of atrocity in order to fill in the gaps in history as a new Taiwan is being written into existence. In this body of literature, women as victims have clearly been...

... “poststructuralist” turn, the historical transformation of the political signifier of “China” already provided an occasion for a critical theory of the subject for queer Chinese writers. Beginning with a close reading of Chen Ruoxi's Paper Marriage , one of the earliest full-length queer novels in Chinese, this...

...Ding Naifei Imagined concubinage refers to fictional representations of urban marriage and romantic love in crisis in early 1980s Taiwan by women writers in short stories, novellas, and novels featuring female protagonists. This article's main question arises from a Taiwan context wherein a...

...Kyle Ikeda This article examines two early pieces of literary war fiction by Okinawa's leading contemporary writer, Medoruma Shun, that deal with two kinds of unarticulated memories of the Battle of Okinawa: memory constrained by social consequence and the inexpressible memory of trauma. Both...

...Christopher Payne This article revolves around the contemporary Taiwanese writer Wuhe and the Taiwanese melodic black-metal band ChthoniC ( Shanling ) and their “political” use of the Wushe Incident that occurred in 1930 in colonial Taiwan. The event, which was brutally repressed by the Japanese...

...King-Kok Cheung This essay takes issue both with scholars who consider Chinese allusions in Asian American literature as Orientalist and with critics who advocate wholesale reclamation of an Asian (heroic) tradition. It shows through a detailed analysis of two poems how Chinese American writers...

...Yukiko Shigeto In 1934 Nakano Shigeharu (1902 – 79), a Marxist writer and key figure in the Japanese proletarian literature movement since the mid-1920s, renounced his ties with the Japan Communist Party by way of vowing not to participate in social movements, an act known in Japanese as tenkô . It...

...Christopher Weinberger This essay offers a new reading of a pivotal and controversial novella, “Gan” (“The Wild Geese,” 1911), by major modern Japanese writer Mori Ōgai. Scholars (such as Dennis Washburn and Shiokawa Tetsuya) have argued that Ōgai's formal experimentation and aesthetic ideals led...

...Christina Yi This article examines the intersection of kokugo (national language) ideology and the kōminka (imperialization) movement in the early 1940s through the juxtaposition of two key texts: the Japanese-language story “Hikari no naka ni” (“Into the Light,” 1939), written by the Korean writer...

... , 1973), the south Korean writer Ch'oe In-hun engaged in a sustained attempt to write a performative history that would unpack the multilayered coloniality informing the Cold War condition on the Korean peninsula: the intersection of statist authoritarianism and U.S. neocolonial developmentalism with a...

... (reform)-era policies made it possible for young Mizoguchi Kenji to make Japan’s first expressionist film, Blood and Soul ( Chi to rei , 1923). Blood and Soul is based on a novella by the half-Russian, half-Japanese writer Ōizumi Kokuseki. It tells the story of a Chinese jeweler in Nagasaki who inherits...

...Irena Hayter This essay focuses on perception and the senses in Japanese literary modernism and specifically in the so-called new sensationist ( shinkankakuha ) writers, especially Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) and Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947). The critical debates that unfolded around their...

...William H. Bridges, IV This essay considers the nonfictional writings on black literature and American race relations penned by Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō between the years 1961 (when Ōe attended the Asian-African Writers Conference held in Tokyo) and 1968 (when he delivered a series of speeches...