San Antonio College Library

Oe?s most important novel, A Personal Matter, has been called by The New York Times?close to a perfect novel.? In A Personal Matter, Oe has chosen a difficult, complex though universal subject: how does one face and react to the birth of an abnormal child? Bird, the protagonist, is a young man of 27 with antisocial tendencies who more than once in his life, when confronted with a critical problem, has?cast himself adrift on a sea of whisky like a...

Two elaborate tales written in the early 1960s by the Japanese author Mizukami (1919--2004) explore volcanic oedipal urges lurking just below the surface of unlikely love triangles. In The Temple of the Wild Geese, set at a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mountains, Jinen, an unhappy, disfigured and lonely orphaned novice, develops a filial crush on Satoko, a recent widow and the reverend Jikai's new common-law wife, which she encourages. It's a simple...

"Over a thousand years of stories and memoirs that reflect the changing status and ongoing struggle of women in the Orient"--Page 1 of cover.

Two writers, Natsume Soseki and Shimazaki Toson, invented the modern Japanese novel. Soseki is the eccentric novelist who appears on the 10,000 yen note. His contemporary, Shimazaki Toson, brought to Japanese fiction a lyricism previously seen only in poetry and nature writing.

"Yukio Mishima's Runaway Horses is the second novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Again we encounter Shigekuni Honda, who narrates this epic tale of what he believes are the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsugae. In 1932, Shigekuni Honda has become a judge in Osaka. Convinced that a young rightist revolutionary, Isao, is the reincarnation of his friend Kiyoaki, Honda commits himself to saving the youth...

From one of Japan's greatest modern writers comes an exquisitely disturbing novel of sexual combat and concealed passion, a work that distills beauty, longing, and loathing into an intoxicating tale. An aging, embittered novelist sets out to avenge himself on the women who have betrayed him. He finds the perfect instrument in Yuichi, a young man whose beauty makes him irresistible to women but who is just discovering his attraction to other men. As...

"This volume presents in translation for the first time a collection of twenty-five stories and novellas representative of Japanese authors who worked in the modernist idiom from 1913 to 1938. Its prefatory materials provide a systematic overview of the literary movement's salient features - anti-naturalism, cosmopolitanism, the concept of the double self, and actionism - and describe how 'modanizumu' evolved from its early "jagged edges" into a sophisticated...

"Thomas Rimer's book seeks to explain the background, structural principles, and development of pre-modem and modern Japanese fiction in a way that is comprehensive, methodical, and accessible to the general reader."--Publisher's description.