The first half of my thesis are my translations from Yumi Hirosawa’s Onna O Aisuru Onnatachi. The first translation is excerpts from a high school girls journal documenting her realization and acceptance of being lesbian, and her time with her first girlfriend. The second translation is a report by a freelance writer on three different lesbian bars in Shinjuku Ni-Chome. The most notable bar is an onabe bar called Little Prince. Onabe in the simplest terms are women who dress and act like men. Onabe are important to the research portion of my thesis because they allowed me to research how masculine identities among Japanese women are formed. The documentary Shinjuku Boys interviews three onabe. From them it is made clear that being an onabe is not as simple as presenting as a man but is a complex relationship with one’s body, societal norms and parental pressures. We learn that onabe is different than being trans - which some would say is Onabe’s Western equivalent - yet various part of those identities can line up. Secondly the cultural phenomena Takarazuka and the women that play the otoko-yaku, or men's roles, makes clear the idea of what masculinity is and how women should wear it on their bodies. Even though the otoko-yaku and musume-yaku hyper-perform gender their exaggeration helps clarify how the women from Queer Japan: Personal Stories of Japanese Lesbians, Gay, Transsexuals, and Bisexuals grappled with their sexuality and gender. Lastly, the fictional stories from Sparkling Rain: And Other Fiction from Japan of Women Who Love Women coupled with the firsthand accounts from Queer Japan further develops the idea and struggles of masculine women’s bodies. In my thesis I aim to look at how masculinity is written onto Japanese woman's bodies both by themselves and others, and the struggles that they encounter because of their deviant sexual and gender identities. In my thesis these are the research questions I aim to answer: What are the modes in which queer women push away masculinity? Yet how do they perform and enforce it? How do these women view or interpret other women who are more masculine? How does having a masculine identity affect one’s perception of themselves? How do these women cope with being both lesbian and masculine of center? Why are the otoko-yaku women of Takarazuka praised for their daily performance of masculinity while onabe are scrutinized for it? And if both are forms of entertainment, mainly for other women, why is one more acceptable than another?

O Japão de meados do século XX apresentava um contexto em que influências advindas do ocidente desde a abertura dos portos mesclavam-se à tradição japonesa. Nesse contexto viviam as irmãs Makioka, personagens centrais do romance de Junichiro Tanizaki e objeto principal da presente pesquisa. Por meio da figura de cada uma delas temos acesso ao modo como essas influências adentraram no dia a dia de parte da sociedade japonesa, mais especificamente da família Makioka, tradicional da região de Osaka, e seu círculo social. Para desenvolver esse estudo, faremos a contextualização do período vivido pelo autor e pelas personagens por ele criadas, bem como de que maneira os acontecimentos tiveram participação na formação das mesmas. Também será feita uma análise das personagens secundárias a fim de ampliar a visão acerca das principais. E, finalmente, de acordo com conceitos a respeito da construção de personagem, faremos um estudo das quatro irmãs, levando em consideração aquilo que estava mais na superfície, acessível num primeiro olhar, além dos elementos que compunham o modo de ser de cada uma delas, com as amálgamas e sobreposições resultantes do período. / Japan in the mid-twentieth century displayed a context which influences brought from western culture since the opening of the ports blended to Japanese tradition. The Makioka sisters, central characters of the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki and main subject of this research, lived in this cultural context. Through each one of these characters, we can access the way these influences entered everyday life of part of Japanese society, especially Makioka, a traditional family from Osaka area and their social circle. For the purpose of this study, we will contextualize the period lived by the author and his created characters, as well as how events contributed for their construction. The secondary characters also will be analyzed in order to amplify the view about the main characters. Finally, according to concepts about literary character construction, we will study the four sisters, considering what relies on the surface, accessible at first glance, such as elements that create the profile of each one of them, alongside amalgams and overlaps resulting from this period.

This project explores Japan’s complex literary and cultural negotiation with China from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, focusing on the role of intermediary texts (dictionaries, encyclopedias, and commentaries) and the different modes of receiving and constructing Chinese culture depending on historical periods and scholarly lineages. As the larger process by which Chinese history and literature became part of the Japanese literary culture has long been studied on the assumption that there is direct textual continuity between Japanese texts (in literary Sinitic) and Chinese continental texts, the tracking down of citations, allusion, and references to Chinese source texts has commanded great scholarly attention. Yet this assumption obscures other, equally important histories – such as a popular understanding of Chinese culture, or a conceptual perception of Chinese culture, that was NOT based on direct textual continuity – that lies at the heart of this project. The introduction outlines three modes of receiving and constructing Chinese literary culture in pre-modern japan. One was the text-based, canonical view of Chinese history and literature, which relied almost exclusively on texts and genres that were canonized in the Nara and Heian periods state university (daigakuryō) – Confucian classics, Chinese official dynastic histories, and Chinese poetry. In contrast with it was a more popular, name-based understanding of Chinese culture that emerged from various intermediary genres (such as anecdotal literature, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and commentaries) both in China and in Japan. This mode of reception and construction was not based on texts so much as on what I call “cultural signs” (particularly Chinese names, well-known anecdotes, and visual cues) and required no knowledge of the original literary Sinitic. Third was a conceptual, term-based perception, manifested in such concepts as “loyalty” and “filial piety.” Written in the same kanji characters, these terms served as common threads linking Chinese and Japanese literary writings on the one hand, but also took on new meanings and associations in the Japanese cultural imagination. Chapter 1 outlines the importation of Chinese books and manuscripts in relation to the center of scholarship and the main intellectual groups up until the twelfth century. Drawing on evidence from commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū (The Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems for Recitation, 1013) and from The Tales of China (Kara monogatari, late Heian period) on the themes of exile and loyalty, I discuss the rising interests in referencing anecdotal literature and compiling intermediaries (dictionaries, encyclopedias, and commentaries) in the twelfth century that eventually contributed to the formation of a more popular, name-based understanding of Chinese history and literature. Chapter 2 investigates the Japanese medieval interpretations of Chinese official histories (“Chūsei Shiki”), which features a tension and negotiation between the canonical and the non-canonical texts and gravitates towards recurring themes, character types, and core values. In particular, I look into the themes of wisdom, virtue, loyalty, and filial piety in A Miscellany of Ten Maxims (Jikkinshō, 1252) and The Tales of the Heike (Heike monogatari, ca. 1308-1311), which were largely constructed from a relatively more classical, Tang-based perspective, in despite of the fact that Chinese Song dynasty culture had already been imported to Japan along with the introduction of Chinese Chan (J. Zen) Buddhism in the thirteenth through fourteenth centuries. In Chapter 3, I examine the Taiheiki (A Chronicle of Great Peace, 1340s-1371), a unique text that acts as a nexus for many themes of this project. Analyzing the use of Chinese tales, maxims and proverbs, and poetry in relation to the themes of loyalty, wisdom, righteousness, and filial piety, I show that, unlike The Tales of the Heike, the Taiheiki revealed a thriving concern with the Song culture, which involved new editions, new commentaries, and new poetic theory. I also show that a conceptual, term-based perception of Chinese culture was taking shape. Chapter 4 explores the suddenly intensified scholarly exchange among different intellectual groups – the Zen monks, the Shintō priests, warriors, and court aristocrats – in the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries. Tracing the threads of new books and new theories in Kiyohara Nobukata’s lecture notes on the Mōgyū (Inquiry of the Youth), The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars, and the picture scroll (emaki) of the Xianyang Palace, I discuss the expansion of knowledge and audience from priests and aristocrats to influential military families and wealthy commoners in late medieval Japan, the formation of new imaginations regarding Chinese history and literature, and the final transition from a pro-Tang prospective to a Song-centered understanding of China. In conclusion, I argue for the literary and cultural reception and construction of Chinese culture as not only a large and complex source text, in a long history of Sino-Japanese intertextuality, but as a complex cultural construction that was packaged and modified, sometimes for easy consumption, to reinforce key values (such as loyalty and filial piety), and that was readily identified even by those with limited access to literary Sinitic. By illustrating the processes by which Chinese history and literature were largely filtered through and transmitted by intermediaries into medieval Japanese literary culture, this project provides a new history of the reception of Chinese culture in the Japanese literary imagination.

This dissertation investigates how textual negotiations of "human feeling" and its ethically disruptive potential fundamentally shaped the production of literature in Japan over the early modern-modern divide well into the 20th century. "Human feeling" (Jap. jô, Chin. qing) was a loaded term in traditional Confucian discourses that subsumed amorous sentiment and sexual desire. It was seen as both a powerful force that could reinforce important societal bonds (such as the one between husband and wife) and as transgressive and ethically suspect. While traditional literary discourse, reaching back to the "Great Preface" of the Chinese Classic of Poetry (Shijing), defined poetry as a medium that could channel potentially unregulated emotions and desires, from the 18th century onward a strong awareness of "human feeling" started shaping the production of a broader spectrum of Japanese genres, such as jôruri puppet theater and, especially from the early 19th century, narrative fiction. I argue that the necessity to represent and write about potentially transgressive feelings and desires lies at the heart of major genres in 19th century Japan. At the same time this engendered the often conscious impulse to regulate these feelings ethically, for instance, through the specific dynamics of gender and plot. I define negotiations of "human feeling" as the simultaneous impulse in writing not only to represent but also to ethically and socially regulate and control feelings and desires. Precisely because the representation and negotiation of "human feeling" define the very essence of Japanese poetic writing and, from the 19th century onward, increasingly that of narrative writing as well, I argue that negotiations of "human feeling" are central to the broader emergence and formation of modern literature in Japan. My first chapter examines selected ninjôbon ("human feeling") by Tamenaga Shunsui (1790-1843) and Kyokutei Bakin's (1767-1848) long narrative yomihon ("books for reading") cycle Nansô Satomi Hakkenden (Eight Dog Chronicle of the Nansô Satomi Clan, 1814-42). I examine how both ninjôbon and yomihon writings explore the deep opposition as well as the implicit affinity between "human feeling" and the sphere of Confucian ethics. My second chapter investigates a variety of novels (shôsetsu) written in the "long" decade of the 1880s: the translated novel Karyû shunwa (Spring Tale of Flowers and Willows, 1878-79), political fiction, and Tsubouchi Shôyô's (1859-1935) rewriting and reform of political fiction at the end of the decade. I for instance examine how these novels -- such as Suehiro Tetchô's (1849-96) Setchûbai (Plum Blossoms in the Snow, 1886) or Shôyô's Imo to se kagami (Mirror of Marriage, 1885-86) -- allegorically negotiate both transgressive sexual desire and chaste spiritual love within a teleological plot structure of democratic reform and heroic activity. My third chapter turns to Meiji-period fiction after 1890, in particular to texts that thematize the new medium of art as well as the figure of the artist or the literary writer. I argue that these texts -- Kôda Rohan's (1867-1947) Fûryûbutsu (The Buddha of Romance, 1889), Mori Ôgai's (1862-1922) German trilogy (1889-90), or Tayama Katai's (1871-1930) Futon (The Quilt, 1907) - continue the ethical negotiation between transgressive sexual desire and spiritual feelings within an implicitly allegorical plot structure that points back to 1880s political fiction. My fourth chapter largely focuses on the diversity of Natsume Sôseki's (1867-1916) early literary oeuvre, including various genres of poetry, so-called sketch writing (shaseibun), and novels. I argue that Sôseki's literary experimentation, for instance in Kusamakura (The Grass Pillow, 1906), with various non-novelistic genres stems from the desire to devise an alternative regime of literature that mediates the representation of "human feeling" in a more detached manner than that of the novel. At the same time, Sôseki's novel writing - as I demonstrate through my reading of Sorekara (And Then, 1909) - brings back a non-detached focus on "human feeling" that profoundly echoes the earlier attempt in 19th century fiction to reconcile transgressive feelings with the telos of a heroic and ethically driven plot.

This dissertation examines the role of aesthetics in Japanese literary discourse, with attention to the emergence of new cross-cultural perspectives, from the late 1880s through the 1920s. Modernity in Japan was marked by the rapid and often jarring juxtapositions of new techniques and ideas from Western sources against older Japanese traditions, and my project considers how literary authors envisioned and interpreted this cultural eclecticism. In particular, I focus on their reactions to Western paintings and sculptures. The visual arts seemed to offer viewers a direct access to `universal' aesthetic values though their non-linguistic nature, and thus appealed to those seeking to attain cosmopolitan perspectives. Through analyzing Japanese writers' literary responses to foreign artworks, and their ideas on vision as an avenue of information, I investigate the changing nature of representation and signification in this new age, and the role of literary language within it. I take as the main subjects of my dissertation Mori Ogai (1862-1922), the members of the Shirakaba School such as Mushanokôji Saneatsu (1885-1976) and Shiga Naoya (1883-1971) during the period of their eponymous publication Shirakaba (1910-1923), and Akutagawa Ryûnosuke (1892-1927). Each of these authors has been both praised and denigrated for the high-minded idealism and aestheticism of his works, in no small part because of a marked tendency to employ foreign literary and artistic references. I argue that despite assessments that their works had been composed at an intellectual remove from the social and material contexts in which they lived, the ideal of aesthetics they had upheld as a fixed and transcendental principle that allowed for their appreciation of imported images and ideas of beauty, in fact catalyzed their critical assessments of their own discursive positions within Japanese society. These writers explored the links and the disjunctions between their artistic ideals--which spanned across disparate cultural and national boundaries--and their more immediate awareness of themselves as citizens of modern Japan. They discovered that for them, any attempt at cosmopolitanism had to take place within the contexts of their Japanese realities, and any thoughts about it had to be voiced through the medium of Japanese literary language. Even visual images could not ultimately elide the viewer's conceptual frameworks, and were interpreted in light of them. What resulted was thus a distinctly hybrid outlook in which their conceptions of Japan, the world, their individual identities, and their creative and critical productions, were indelibly linked with each other.

Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo primordial apresentar um estudo sobre a vida de Senhime, neta de Tokugawa Ieyasu, que concluiu a unificação do país, após vários anos de contendas, e estabeleceu o xogunato de Tokugawa que dominou o Japão por quase trezentos anos, tendo como base a tradução integral da obra Senhimesama (A Princesa Senhime) de Hiraiwa Yumie. O trabalho é dividido basicamente em três partes: na primeira parte far-se-á considerações sobre a relação entre a obra e o romance histórico; na segunda parte, será enfocada a personagem Senhime baseada na mescla de fatos históricos e fictícios e, na terceira parte, será abordada a relação entre Senhime e os vários castelos para os quais se viu obrigada a se deslocar nos períodos marcantes de sua vida / This research had as its primary aim to present a study on the life of Sen\'hime, granddaughter of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who concluded the country unification after years of strife, and established the Tokugawa xogunate of Japan which ruled for almost three hundred years. This study is based in the full translation of Yumie Hiraiwa work Sen\'himesama (Princess Senhime). This research is basically divided into three parts: the first part will make considerations about the relation between the work and the historical novel; the second part will focus on Sen\'hime character which is based in a mixture of historical and fictional facts and in the third part, we will look at the relationship between Sen\'hime and the several castles towards which she was forced to move on remarkable periods of her life

A proposta do presente trabalho consiste na tradução para o português do romance Kaniksen (O Navio-Fábrica Caranguejeiro, 1929) de Kobayashi Takij. Para chegar ao objetivo proposto, procedemos uma historização da vida e obra de Kobayashi Takiji, no sentido de compreendermos a trajetória literária do autor, seu envolvimento no movimento proletário e o contexto sócio-político em que o romance foi escrito. Visando introduzir O Navio-Fábrica Caranguejeiro ao leitor deste trabalho, são feitos alguns apontamentos sobre o romance: uma apresentação de seu tema e narrativa, um breve levantamento histórico de seu surgimento, suas repercussões no Japão e no mundo, e um levantamento e comentário crítico da obra. / The purpose of this work is the translation of the novel Kaniksen (The Crab Cannery Ship, 1929) by Kobayashi Takij into Portuguese. To reach the proposed objective, we made a historical research about the life and work of Kobayashi Takiji, to understand the literary trajectory of the author, his involvement in the proletarian movement and the socio-political context in which the novel was written. In order to introduce The Crab Cannery Ship the reader of this work, we are made some observations about the novel: a presentation of its theme and narrative, a brief historical research of its appearance, its impact on Japan and around the world, and a survey and critical commentary about the work.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Faculty of the Divinity School, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation discusses the Edo-period Japanese translation, adaptation, and theoretical analysis of Chinese popular fiction and drama between 1680 and 1815. I focus on the ways in which Japanese encounters with fiction and drama written in the unfamiliar “vernacular” engendered reinterpretations of Japan’s cultural relationship to China. Whereas this relationship had previously centered largely on the Confucian classics and their ongoing interpretation in Japan, I argue that the introduction of vernacular texts enabled new modes of visualizing China’s position as a locus of textual and cultural authority. I connect the increasingly formalized study of vernacular texts to a discourse on temporality and linguistic change, and demonstrate the degree to which engagement with late imperial Chinese fiction and drama led to the reformulation of definitions of culture, literature, and language. By dramatically widening the range of materials and texts that could be used to construct a vision of China, the introduction of vernacular fiction and drama encouraged Edo-period philologists and fiction connoisseurs to reconceptualize both the criteria for judging textual competence, and the position of their own writing with respect to China. Rather than focusing on eighteenth-century efforts to efface traces of China’s cultural imprint on Japan, I seek to complicate accounts of the development of Japanese literature by exploring the oeuvres of philosophers, philologists, and fiction writers who attempted to theorize areas of convergence between Chinese and Japanese literary production. The study is divided into four chapters. Chapter One introduces the major themes of the dissertation as a whole and analyzes the rhetoric surrounding both the introduction of Chinese vernacular texts and subsequent attempts at reifying their study as an independent academic discipline. Chapter Two develops these themes further through an analysis of three eighteenth-century explorations of aesthetics, genre, and literary translation. In Chapters Three and Four, I examine a group of anomalous “reverse translations” of Japanese fiction and drama into the language and structure of vernacular Chinese fiction—using these largely overlooked texts to map out networks of literary contact and discuss the hermeneutics underlying eighteenth-century Japanese engagement with vernacular Chinese fiction and drama. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations