2024年2月23日
| Editors | Title | Publisher | Year of Publication |
|---|---|---|---|
| Takayuki Shonaka, Takahiro Mimura, Shinya Morikawa | Japanese Perspectives on Kazuo Ishiguro | Palgrave Macmillan | 2024 |
【Summary】
This collection of essays offers new perspectives from Japan on Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. It analyses the Japanese-born British author from the vantage point of his birthplace, showing how Ishiguro remains greatly indebted to Japanese culture and sensibilities. The influence of Japanese literature and film is evident in Ishiguro’s early novels as he deals with the problem of the atomic bomb and Japan’s war responsibility, yet his later works also engage with folk tales and the modern popular culture of Japan. The chapters consider a range of Japanese influences on Ishiguro and adaptations of Ishiguro’s work, including literary, cinematic and animated representations. The book makes use of newly archived drafts of Ishiguro’s manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas to explore the origins of his oeuvre. It also offers sharp, new examinations of Ishiguro’s work in relation to memory studies, especially in relation to Japan.
This collection of critical articles ranges from considerations of the infuence of Japanese culture and ideas on Ishiguro and investigations of his creative process as a writer to analyses of the structures of his novels using conceptual models. The arguments in this book do not suggest that only Japanese readers can understand Japanese culture and ideas. Considering that Ishiguro himself is a writer of ‘two-world literature’ (Suter) or ‘the born translated’ (Walkowitz) who illustrates or bridges the distance between Japan and the West, this collection of articles from Japanese perspectives emphasises the necessity of the openness of cultural translation, not the exclusivity that narrowly deals with the peculiarity of a single culture. Furthermore, this attitude requires broader consideration in a global context from perspectives other than the Japanese and Western to arrive at a deeper understanding of this English writer born in Japan.
【Contents】
1 Introduction
Takayuki Shonaka, Takahiro Mimura, and Shinya Morikawa
Part I Early Japanese Infuences
2 Blithe Spirit: Young Ishiguro’s Contact with Japanese Children’s Culture through Shogakukan’s Graded Educational Magazines
Motoko Sugano
3 Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
Ria Taketomi
Part II Ghosts and Stereotypes
4 Constructing Japan with Stereotypes: An Analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘A Family Supper’
Yoshiki Tajiri
5 Envisioned ‘Ghosts Project’: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Imaginary Nagasaki
Megumi Kato
6 The Hidden Ghost Story: Ishiguro, Ugetsu and Troubled English Belief
Anni Shen
Part III War and Responsibility
7 ‘The Shame of Being on the Wrong Side of History’: Defeat and the Failures of Masculinities in An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day
Kunio Shin
8 Between the A-Bombing and Responsibilities for World War II: Changes in the Themes of Ishiguro’s Early Novels
Masako Matsuda
9 The War Complex and Us: The Representation of the Sino-Japanese War and Cosmopolitanism in Empire of the Sun, When We Were Orphans, and My Shanghai, 1942–1946
Erica Aso
Part IV Creative Development
10 Tracing the Origin of Kazuo Ishiguro Through His Early Song Lyrics
Takayuki Shonaka
11 ‘The Remains’ of Charlotte Brontë in the Early Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro
Hiromi Nagara
12 The Evolution of Stevens Towards The Remains of the Day
Shinya Morikawa
Part V Past and Future
13 Monumental Moments: Narrative Complicity in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro
Takahiro Mimura
14 Nonhuman/Posthuman Aspects in Kazuo Ishiguro’s New Millennium Novels
Hiroshi Ikezono