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104 books match the query 'Japanese' and 2 start with h

cover of Home Away from Home: Japanese Corporate Wives in the United States

Home Away from Home

Japanese Corporate Wives in the United States

Sawa Kurotani

Duke University Press, 2005

Drawing attention to domestic space as the critical juncture between the global and the local, Home Away from Home is an innovative ethnography of the daily lives of middle-class Japanese housewives who accompany their husbands on temporary corporate job assignments in the United States. These women are charged with the task of creating and maintaining restful Japanese homes in a foreign environment so that their husbands are able to remain productive, loyal workers for Japanese multinationals and their children are properly socialized and educated as Japanese citizens abroad. Arguing that the homemaking components of transnational communities have not received adequate attention, Sawa Kurotani demonstrates how gender dynamics and the politics of the domestic sphere are integral to understanding national identity and transnational mobility.

Kurotani interviewed and spent time with more than 120 women in three U.S. locations with sizable expatriate Japanese communities: Centerville, a pseudonymous Midwestern town; the New York metropolitan area; and North Carolina’s Research Triangle area. She highlights the contradictory situations faced by the transient wives. Their husbands’ assignments in the United States typically last from three to five years, and they frequently emphasize the temporariness of their situation, referring to it as a “long vacation.” Yet they are responsible for creating comfortable homes for their families, which necessitates producing a familiar and permanent environment. Kurotani looks at the dynamic friendships that develop among the wives and describes their feelings about returning to Japan. She conveys how their sense of themselves as Japanese women, of home, and of their relationships with family members are altered by their personal experiences of transnational homemaking.

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cover of How Dark Is My Flower: Yosano Akiko and the Invention of Romantic Love

How Dark Is My Flower

Yosano Akiko and the Invention of Romantic Love

Leith Morton

University of Michigan Press, 2023

The poetry of Yosano Akiko covers all the many and varied aspects of the experience of love—from early romantic encounters between the lover and beloved to the intimate pleasures of mutual infatuation and then true love. The journey outlined in Akiko’s verse also grapples with jealousy and unrequited passion, as Akiko’s poem-narrative treats  the rivalry between herself and her best friend, the poet Yamakawa Tomiko, for the affection of the dashing young literary lion, Yosano Tekkan, who later became Akiko’s husband. Thus, How Dark Is My Flower: Yosano Akiko and the Invention of Romantic Love tells a number of stories: a real-life romance unfolds in the poetry of these three poets examined in the book, as well as the story of the journey from romanticism to modernism   undertaken by early 20th century Japanese poetry.

How Dark Is My Flower emphasizes the astonishing innovations in diction and style, not to mention content, in Akiko’s work that transformed the tanka genre from a hidebound and conservative mode of verse to something much more daring and modern. This book pays particular attention to poetry, particularly the tanka genre, in the evolution of modernism  in Japanese literature and breaks new ground in the study of modern Japanese literature by examining the invention and evolution of the concept of romantic love.
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