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Japan and Japonisme
The Self and the Other in Representations of Japanese Culture
Noriko Murai
Amsterdam University Press, 2025
Japan and Japonisme: The Self and the Other in Representations of Japanese Culture explores Japan’s engagement with and responses to Japonisme, and presents new perspectives on the history and enduring influence of Japonisme as a cultural discourse. The term “Japonisme” has come to encapsulate the West’s interests in Japanese arts and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Japonisme contributed to Japan’s global reputation as an artistic nation, but it also produced persistent stereotypes about the Japanese, such as the image of “geisha.” This pioneering anthology also demonstrates how Japan has espoused the modern Western fascination with its arts and culture to create and promote its national cultural identity. Japan and Japonisme introduces innovative studies on Japonisme by leading experts in the field, and covers the visual arts, art criticism and exhibitions, fashion, literature, horticulture, and popular culture in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
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Murder Most Modern
Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture
Sari Kawana
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

The quintessential international genre, detective fiction often works under the guise of popular entertainment to expose its extensive readership to complex moral questions and timely ethical dilemmas. The first book-length study of interwar Japanese detective fiction, Murder Most Modern considers the important role of detective fiction in defining the country’s emergence as a modern nation-state.

Kawana explores the interactions between the popular genre and broader discourses of modernity, nation, and ethics that circulated at this pivotal moment in Japanese history. The author contrasts Japanese works by Edogawa Ranpo, Unno Juza, Oguri Mushitaro, and others with English-language works by Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie to show how Japanese writers of detective fiction used the genre to disseminate their ideas on some of the most startling aspects of modern life: the growth of urbanization, the protection and violation of privacy, the criminalization of abnormal sexuality, the dehumanization of scientific research, and the horrors of total war.

Kawana’s comparative approach reveals how Japanese authors of the genre emphasized the vital social issues that captured the attention of thrill-seeking readers-while eluding the eyes of government censors.

Sari Kawana is assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

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