Category: Literary Studies / All genres/ Theory

Interpretations of Miyazawa Kenji’s work have gone through several iterations since his death: from virtual obscurity he was recovered as an author of children’s literature and poetry, and, in the postwar, his writing was appreciated for its incorporation of Buddhist themes and Miyazawa himself became synonymous with provincial Japan. After the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami, and …

Japanese newspaper novels emerged as a genre in the latter half of the 19th century. In 1886, the Yubin Hochi Shimbun (YHS), a hitherto primarily political newspaper, declared that it would print novels in order to internationalize its readers. The editor Morita Shiken had visited Europe and America to learn how to run and edit …

The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, is the most famous Japanese classic novel and the world’s oldest existing novel by a woman. My paper sheds light on the heretofore understudied Kakaisho, an earliest annotation of The Tale of Genji, written by Yotsutsuji no Yoshinari, in the late 14th century. Kakaisho is characterized by its …