...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...

... the working-class writing subject and fellow workers a sense of dignity and collective identity. Both the Picun writers and the migrant worker writers in general can be considered “unlikely writers.” The term captures their marginality in the cultural field, as well as the struggle to negotiate...

...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...

...Lara C. W. Blanchard Cui Xiuwen (b. 1970) and Yu Hong (b. 1966) are contemporary Chinese artists whose images of women reflect a complicated gendered perspective. This article focuses on Cui’s Ladies’ Room (2000) and Yu’s Female Writer (2004, from the series She ). Both can be construed as feminist...

... 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...

...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...

...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 raised on Java in the Dutch East Indies and who spent more than thirty years there. This article argues that Dermoût is a key writer for understanding affective economies, because she devotes significant time and effort in her fiction to fleshing out Native characters, something that few writers of her...

...Christian Uhl In 1944 the Japanese sinologist and cultural critic Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-77) published his seminal study, Rojin , on the life and work of the preeminent modern Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936). In this book Takeuchi paints the portrait of a pugnacious man of letters, someone...

... 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...

...” or “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...

...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...

...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...

...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...