Japanese Writers Research Articles

Reversed Conversion, Theodicy, and Cross-cultural Mission in Shūsaku Endō's Silence and Zhenyun Liu's Someone to Talk To

Abstract: To present the complex relationship between Christianity and modern non-Western societies, this article compares two novels from East Asia, Silence (1966) by Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō and Someone to Talk To (2009) by Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun, that touch on themes of Christianity and cross-cultural tensions in indigenous contexts, including theodicy, suffering, and hope. Endō portrays a Japanese society through the eyes of a western Catholic priest. In comparison, Liu's literary innovation presents a possibility of missionary integration through humanly mundane details of life.

“The place I like best in this world is the kitchen”: Reading the Kitchenspace in Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen

Banana Yoshimoto (the pen name of Mahoko Yoshimoto, born in 1964) is a Japanese writer who, like her contemporary Haruki Murakami, is distinguished by her desire to question and problematize aspects of modern Japanese society in her fiction. Banana Yoshimoto is regarded as a representative figure in contemporary Japanese fiction, foregrounding the experiences and self-questioning of a younger generation struggling to find its place in a society torn between conservatism and the contingencies of a radical, dynamic, globalized, but at the same time, consumer culture. The elusiveness of relationships, of intimacy, of love and life, the difficulty of defining and finding happiness, and the inscrutability of one’s self are some of the central themes in her writing. This paper looks at Yoshimoto’s widely acclaimed novella, Kitchen (1987), and the manner in which Mikage Sakurai, the protagonist, manoeuvers through death, loneliness and healing to arrive at a secure sense of self. This happens through the primary metaphor of the kitchen, and the gendered associations that it elicits. At the same time, Yoshimoto’s representation of this space, as well as of food in general, challenges certain stereotypes associated with these. In the process, interpersonal relationships as well as the conventional idea of family also come to be reconstituted in the novella.

Portret artysty w wieku dojrzałym. Analiza porównawcza „Patriotyzmu” Yukio Mishimy z filmową biografią tego artysty „Mishima” w reżyserii Paula Schradera

This article constitutes a comparison of two films — Patriotism (1965) by Yukio Mishima and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) by Paul Schrader, a biographical film about the Japanese writer and director of the first film. The article focuses on how the latter film imitates the former, both in formal style and in showing the act of suicide. The analysis also covers problems of adaptation, theatricality, homoerotism and the tradition of Japanese cinema.

The Role of Cinema in the Development of the Creative Thought of the Japanese Writer Tanizaki Junichiro

The subject of the study is the work of the largest Japanese writer of the XX century. Tanizaki Junichiro (谷崎潤一郎, 1886-1965), in particular, the essay "The present and the future of cinema" (活動写真の現在と将来, Katsudo:syasin no genzai to se: Paradise, 1917). This work can be described as a milestone, because it marks the beginning of the evolution of Tanizaki Junichiro's creative thought – passion for modernism, progress, cinema. After the publication of the essay "The Present and the Future of cinema", there is an increased interest in the writer's visual techniques characteristic of screenplays; in the early 1920s, a series of works appeared ("Blue Flower" (青い花, Aoi Hana, 1921), "Ave Maria" (アヴェ・マリア, Ave Maria, 1922), "Residents of the port city" (港の人々, Minato no hitobito, 1926), "The Love of a fool" (痴人の愛, Chijin-no ai, 1924), etc.), filled with cinematic scenes, references to Hollywood actresses and Western films. The object of the study is female images in the writer's work, which were created with an eye to Hollywood actresses. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the landmark essay "Present and Future cinema" was not translated into Russian and was not subjected to scientific analysis in Russian literary studies, respectively, the work of Tanizaki Junichiro was considered without taking into account the influence of cinema on him. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the writer became not only one of the creators of the new female image "modan ga: ru" (from the English modern girl) – modern women copying the appearance and habits of Hollywood actresses – in Japanese culture, but also created a female face that penetrated the fabric of Japanese culture, influencing its reality.

Foreword

The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth. (Steven Pinker) …, however, from the viewpoint of a linguist, it is definitely worth having it all. The articles for the summer 2022 issue mainly involve topics either on second language learning and acquisition or historical language changes and the motives for them. They were carefully picked up from numerous proposals, and we are very grateful to every single contributor and also to the reviewers. This issue opens with the article “Examples of Corpus Data Visualization: Collocations in Chinese” in which Ľuboš GAJDOŠ and Elena GAJDOŠOVÁ lightheartedly share a highly beneficial practical procedure that can be used in the visualization of language data, especially in language pedagogy. In a very similar manner to the visualization, DENG Qi presents a tangible example from Japanese in the article “Choice Between the Synonymous Pairs of Sutoppu and Teishi: A Case Study on Synonyms of Western Loanwords and Sino-Japanese in Modern Japanese Based on Corpus”, discussing their usage and functions. Yet another article “The Roman Alphabet Within the Japanese Writing System: Patterns of Usages and Their Significance” by Hironori NISHI explores the usages of the Roman alphabet within the present writing system of Japanese, which is, as the author suggests, induced by more and more frequent horizontal writing and the ever-increasing international interaction. The following article was written by GUO Qingli and CHEW Fong Peng and is entitled “Liushu-based Instruction and Its Effects on the Motivation and Intended Learning Efforts: The Case of Laos Learners of Standard Chinese”. It introduces the Liushu-based instruction and examines its effects on the students' motivation and intended learning efforts. LIU Sha wrote the article “Exceptions vs. Non-exceptions in Sound Changes: Morphological Condition and Frequency”, in which the author tries a unique approach to locate factors that explain exceptions in the diphthongization of [i] to [ei] in Mandarin. Last but not least, Nina GOLOB in her article “Word-Prosodic Typology: The Traps of Seemingly Similar Japanese and Slovene” offers a brief review of research trends on prosody, and by introducing the phonetic properties of the two languages and acquisition difficulties by Slovene speakers of Japanese questions the typological similarity between Japanese and Slovene. Editors and Editorial board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration, and a rise of new research ideas inspired by these papers.

The Roman Alphabet Within the Japanese Writing System: Patterns of Usages and Their Significance

The present study explores the usages of the Roman alphabet within the writing system of Japanese. Japanese is typically said to have three types of characters in its writing system: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. However, the Roman alphabet is also commonly used in Japanese for various purposes along with other types of characters in Japanese. The present study argues that with the recent surge in electronic communication, the writing practice of Japanese is transitioning from vertical writing to horizontal writing, and this transition allows more foreign words and expressions written in the Roman alphabet to be used within Japanese without being converted into katakana loanwords. The present study also discusses the influence of the ever-increasing international interaction to the usages of the Roman alphabet within Japanese.

Asian masculinity celebrated and otherised

Japanese writers portray Chinese and Korean men as physically masculine, which often involves heightened sexuality, in two ways. First, some female writers discuss Japanese women’s heterosexual desire for Chinese and Korean men by emphasising these men’s physicality and desirable masculinity. Second, Japanese novelists often assign hypermasculine language to Chinese and Korean male characters. By celebrating Chinese and Korean masculinity, such depictions offer a counternarrative to derogatory stereotypes that have circulated and continue to circulate in rightwing (often male) nationalistic discourses. At the same time, however, the language these writers employ otherises Chinese and Korean men by hypersexualising them and placing them outside mainstream Japanese society.

After the New Left: On Tsumura Takashi's Early Writings and Proto-“Contemporary Thought” in Japan

This article positions the early career of the Japanese activist and writer Tsumura Takashi as anticipating, from an intellectual and historical-media standpoint, the surge of interest in gendai shisō (“contemporary thought,” i.e. French theory) in 1980s Japan. Often understood as the devolution of theory into a mere commercial fad, the gendai shisō boom—in its reliance on a host of writers who worked at a distance from traditional academic publishing networks—promoted an ethos of interdisciplinary and transgressive knowledge production. Tracing Tsumura's interest in structuralism and post-structuralism as an outgrowth of his participation in the student movement, the article provides a prehistory of gendai shisō in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that Tsumura's creative appropriation of structuralism and post-structuralism took place at a crucial juncture when the academic print networks that had legitimated intellectuals in postwar Japan were being hollowed out from within and without.

The influence of Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction on Hoshi Shin’ichi’s and Akagawa Jirō’s short-short stories

The short-short story was first introduced by Japanese writer Tsuzuki Michio, who in the late 1950s – the early 1960s familiarized the Japanese reader with extra-short stories of American author Fredric W. Brown (1906–1972); his traditions were followed by Japanese writer Hoshi Shin’ichi (1926–1997), Akagawa Jirō (b. 1948), and other authors experimenting in the new genre of social and psychological science fiction, as well as in the genre of fantasy and detective stories. In American literature, three major specific features of a short-short story were formulated: 1) a fresh idea, 2) an unexpected turn of events, 3) an unpredictable ending. These specific features can be traced in Japanese extra-short stories as well. Since the process of the emergence and development of the extra-short story as a new form of Japanese literature was influenced by American micro fiction, the research examines the elements borrowed from Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction in Hoshi Shin’ichi’s and Akagawa Jirō’s first short-short stories; this includes genres, topics, canons, artistic styles and devices, as well as the treatment of certain social problems. The paper analyzes Hoshi’s and Akagawa’s short-short fiction from a comparative perspective, with an emphasis on intertextuality – shaping of a text’s meaning by another text, in this case, the texts by an American writer. Some literary parallels to Fredric W. Brown’s micro fiction can be found in Hoshi Shin’ichi’s first collection of short-short stories «Bokko-chan» (1971), which consists of stories written in 1958–1970, as well as in Akagawa Jirō’s first collection of short-short stories «The Dancing Man» (1986), which consists of stories written in the late 1970s – early 1980s. The succession of plots and philosophical ideas by Brown is examined on the material of seven early short-shorts by Hoshi, where the allusion to the American writer’s micro fiction can be traced; in addition, it is also noted that, in some mystic extra-short stories by Akagawa, it is not the plots which are borrowed, but mostly artistic devices and various techniques, such as psychologism, black humor, wordplay, and metaphorical images. American origins of the Japanese short-short story are investigated for the first time.

Влияние неоконфуцианских взглядов Кайбары Экикэна на творчество писателя Танидзаки Дзюнъитиро

This article is devoted to the gender issue of the early 1930s, which was reflected in the works of Japanese writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, who was very sensitive to needs of the Era. Under the influence of popular treatises “Precepts for Children” (和俗童子訓, Wazoku dōjikun, 1711) and “The Great Learning for Women” (女大学, Onna daigaku, с. 1711–1714) of the Confucian scholar of the late XVII century Kaibara Ekiken. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō created the image of a submissive woman, that was demanded by new time. The writer, who in the early 1920s was interested of erotic images of women freed from shackles of the past, together with a whole Japan made a sharp turn towards traditional views of life: he began to form the image of faithful wives and wise mothers, joining the general flow ‘returning to the roots’ of that time. However, almost immediately after the collapse of the militaristic regime, the writer turned away from the traditional Confucian thought of Kaibara Ekiken, reviving his favorite motif — the image of the ‘femme fatale’. Nevertheless, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō retained a special Japanese aesthetic, which he came to the early 1930s: the Japanese woman was still dressed in a kimono, but the evolution of morals and the lack of unspoken requirements for participation in the formation and strengthening of certain ideological standards, which the national state indulged, allowed Tanizaki Jun’ichirō to say that the traditional Japanese woman can be not only a faithful wife and a wise mother, but also an infernal woman who destroys men and instills voluptuous thoughts in minds of her children. After the Second World War, there was a new stage in the development of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s creative work.

Correlation Analysis of Japanese Literature and Psychotherapy Effects Based on an Equation Diagnosis Algorithm.

Objective On the basis of inheriting the classical aesthetic orientation of Japanese literature, contemporary Japanese literature changes the creative methods of traditional Japanese writers, strives to transcend the national limitations of Japanese literature, and strives to capture literary materials with a “modern feel.” Combined with modern western literary techniques to express the “modern self,” and integrating popular literature with pure literature, Japanese writers created a “healing” literature that is popular all over the world. There is some value in exploring the correlation between Japanese literature and the influence of psychotherapy. Method In this paper, an equation diagnosis algorithm based on iterative learning for a class of linear discrete systems is studied, and the existing discrete iterative learning diagnostics are improved. We exchange the order of time domain and iterative domain to achieve the purpose of point-by-point equation diagnosis. On this basis, a virtual influence initial value estimation algorithm with a sliding window is proposed. The impact that has not been diagnosed is estimated and used as the initial value of the impact, so as to reduce the number of iterations and improve the efficiency of equation diagnosis. This paper takes the public and readers as different perspectives, based on the use and satisfaction theory and prospect theory, and uses interviews and questionnaires to study the communication effect of Japanese literature from the three dimensions of cognition, emotion, and behavior. The cognitive part includes the public's understanding and readers' understanding and reading; the emotional part includes the public's and readers' impressions and emotional attitudes; the behavioral part includes the public's reading situation and readers' behavior changes. Results/Discussion. In the survey of loyal readers, although readers' understanding of Japanese literature has improved compared with the general public, it is not high, and their liking and influence on behavior are slightly lower than the preset level. This paper believes that the existing problems of Japanese literature dissemination are mainly concentrated in three aspects: the market is somewhat biased, which narrows the cognitive scope of users; as a cross-cultural literary work, Japanese literature still makes readers feel that it exists; there is some sense of estrangement, which will affect their enjoyment in reading; as a niche interest, readers lack timely communication and sharing objects after reading, so it is difficult to enhance their sense of identity.

Suicide in Japanese Writers

has been claimed that more than 50 Japanese writers in the 20th century died by suicide, more than in other countries. Ten of these writer-suicides are briefly described, and the life of the most well-known (Yukio Mishima) discussed in more detail. It is apparent that the risk factors for suicide (psychiatric disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, and disrupted interpersonal relationship) were present in many of these writers. The role of Japanese culture and the link between creativity and suicide are also discussed.

Teaching Method of Japanese Professional Writing Course Based on Big Data Fusion

In recent years, the number of Japanese learners has increased year by year. When Japanese is learned as a language, knowledge of the language itself is indispensable. This article aims to explore the teaching methods of Japanese professional writing courses based on the integration of big data. This article first introduces big data fusion and introduces the definition and model of data fusion. Generally, there are two types of data fusion models: distributed and centralized. Then, I analyzed the artificial neural network algorithm, which is a computational model that imitates the animal brain, and then researched the context-based teaching of Japanese professional courses and analyzed the context-based teaching of Japanese professional writing. The results of the context-based Japanese course teaching research show that the average Japanese writing score of the experimental class is 72.7833, the control class score is 66.3333, and the composition fluency scores are 156.27 and 119.73. It can be concluded that the composition performance and composition fluency of students in the experimental class are higher than those in the control class, so educators should let students strengthen vocabulary spelling and memory skills in situational teaching.

Impact of Machine Translation on Japanese Writing Skills

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of machine translation on Japanese writing skills. The ability to write Japanese is also understood through the components of writing. This study uses experimental research using a one-group experimental design. It was conducted at Private University in Jakarta. Data collection techniques are documents and written tests. The participants were 60 students who received the Writing Course. To determine the effect of using machine translation on Japanese writing skills, it was analyzed using the t-test: Paired Two Sample for Means. The results of the study concluded that machine translation had a significant impact on the completion of writing assignments so which led to an increase in writing ability. However, in the study of each component of writing, there are still weaknesses in the aspects of grammar and the development of logical ideas. Therefore, this research has implications for understanding how machine translation works, which has limitations and students must review their writings at the editing stage.

When I Was a Boy in Japan

Japanese children in the 1870s and 1880s were offspring of a centuries-old traditional order who faced a world suddenly dominated by foreign science and commerce. As a child in Meiji Japan, Sakae grew up among survivors of the shogunate and observed their samurai culture displaced by Western morals and practices. Meanwhile the traditional values of Japanese life still exerted a strong influence over his family and education and played a large part in shaping his experience, as recounted with charm and tenderness in this simple and reflective reminiscence. Sakae Shioya (1873–1961) attended Tokyo’s First Imperial College and came to the United States in 1901. He earned an M.A. degree from the University of Chicago in 1903 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1906, both in English. He translated works by contemporary Japanese writers, including Rohan Koda and Kenjiro Tokutomi. In addition to this childhood memoir published in 1906, his later works included Chushingura: An Exposition (1940).

Spatiality, destruction, and the individual in Takeda Taijun’s Sekai: an exposition and critique

This article offers an examination of the Japanese postwar writer Takeda Taijun’s concept of destruction (metsubō) and his view of the sekai, or “world,” as a theoretical tool against Japanese imperialism, and potentially also for a transnational history. It first examines Takeda’s wartime book-length essay entitled Sima Qian: The World of Shiji (Shiba Sen: Shiki no sekai, 1943) to highlight Takeda’s conceptualization of space (kūkan) that anchors his figuration of the sekai. According to Takeda’s reading of Shiji, the structure of the sekai suggests a world without a hegemonic center that could survive its fate of destruction, which is considered by many Takeda scholars to be a prophesy of the bankruptcy of Japanese imperialism. It then points out the focus on the totality of the sekai in Takeda’s Sima Qian, in which the writer looks at history only from a retrospective standpoint and as a bystander. After the first section follows a reading of Takeda’s short story ‘Judgment’ (‘Shinpan,’ 1947) and his last work Shanghai Firefly (Shanhai no hotaru, 1976), in which this article not only observes the trajectory of the evolution of Takeda’s concept of the sekai as an absolute continuity that feeds on the absolute destruction of its parts, but also recognizes how Takeda’s concern of the individual in the sekai has been developed over the years. Finally, it discusses how a transnational history might be possible based on a scrutiny and critique of Takeda’s concept of the sekai.

On the Reflection of Schopenhauer’s Ethics in Fly by Riichi Yokomitsu

The short story Fly, published in 1923 in the Japanese magazine Bungeishunju, is the Japanese neo-sensationalism writer Riichi Yokomitsu’s maiden work. The full text is only more than three thousand five hundred words, but its content is humorous, profound implication, vivid image, it is really a short and pithy life drama. This paper will take the characters in Fly as the research object to discuss the embodiment of Schopenhauer’s ethics in the text.

Conversations with the Dead

Conversations with the Dead

East–West rewriting and recontextualization: Approaching Rashōmon (Akira Kurosawa) and its afterlives from adaptation theory

The legacy of Akira Kurosawa has become ‘fertile land’, beckoning a plethora of intercultural and intermedia adaptations. Rashōmon (1950), which is adapted from two short stories by the great Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), namely, ‘Rashōmon’ (1915) and ‘In a Grove’ (1922), surprised Hollywood by refusing the dominant traditional narrative techniques of the period. Although this masterpiece was created over half a century ago, it has been reproduced continually through multimediated practices. Rashōmon was a cognitive explosion that revolutionized western perceptions of the creative and imaginative potential of eastern cinema. Since its release, this cinematic masterpiece has been rewritten and recontextualized into a slew of film, stage and musical productions. Adaptation is the process of reinterpreting and negotiating a target text for new cultural and sign biospheres. This work analyses the transformation process of Rashōmon into the movie adaptations The Outrage (Ritt 1964) (United States) and อุโมงค์ผาเมือง (The Outrage, also known as At the Gate of the Ghost) () (Thailand) to answer the following questions: what elements are added, amplified or excluded in the Rashōmon adaptations? Can the recontextualization of Rashōmon in the United States and Thailand show how the Rashōmon adaptations accommodate and confront cultural and epochal similarities and differences? What translatable and adaptable ‘textual gaps’ allow the adaptations to discourse and reinterpret the source/original/adapted texts? This article uses theory of adaptation as the main theoretical framework to address the questions above.

Reproduction of Haruki Murakami's Writing Style Based on the English Translation of 1Q84

Haruki Murakami is a well-known Japanese writer living in the United States, deeply influenced by Western writers and works; and even many of his English novels have been translated back into Japanese. Taking Jay Rubin's English version of 1Q84 as an example, this paper discusses the difficulties and strategies of translating Haruki Murakami's near-English-styled Japanese works into English. This study applies the famous British translation theorist Tytler's three principles of translation, specifically analyzes the typical sentences in the English translation, mainly from the perspective of linguistic expression, then examines the translator's translation strategy from the cultural level, comprehensively examines the translation's communication effect. The study finds that Jay Rubin's translation faithfully reproduces the original ideas and style and has its own unique way of dealing with Murakami's special genre. There are few studies on the English translation of 1Q84, most of which focus on the literary exploration of 1Q84 and the development of the meaning of the work, so this study can be said to be a cutting-edge study in the analysis of the translation of the work at present. It not only verifies whether Murakami's work leaves more room for the translator when translated back into English but also gives some insight into translation study and practice.