Japanese literature is written for Japanese readers. This has almost always been the case, meaning that the bulk of secondary studies is also in Japanese. From the later half of the 20th century onward, however, more and more Japanese literature has found its way into translation, primarily in English. Accordingly, some writers of international status or cosmopolitan outlook, such as Mishima Yukio, Ôe Kenzaburô, Murakami Haruki, and Yoshimoto Banana, almost seem to take the foreign reader into consideration in their writings. The awarding of two Nobel Prizes to Japanese authors also suggests a waning of the insularity that characterized Japanese literature during the Tokugawa and Meiji periods.
Japan’s tradition of literary criticism is long indeed, and literary scholarship enjoys a much broader readership in Japan than its counterpart does in the West, despite its focus on sometimes narrow or arcane issues in vogue among Japanese scholars. A few such studies have been translated into English, but the bulk of this work remains in Japanese.
However, since the opening of Japan to the West, non-Japanese have found Japan’s literary traditions worthy of consideration, and since the late 19th century, a steady stream of studies and translations of Japanese literature has been written by scholars in English. This bibliography seeks to identify some of these studies and translations. Beginning in the 1950s, perhaps in response to the global popularity of Japanese films, Japanese works of literature began to find translators and publishers in English, and, from that time until the present, the number of English translations (and, in some cases, retranslations) of literature has proceeded apace.
The present select bibliography is divided into two major categories: General Scholarship and Select Bibliography of Authors and Translations, which are further subdivided. It is composed almost entirely of books, most of which were published during the past few decades; a vast array of journal articles on modern Japanese literature can be mined with a few keystrokes and an effective electronic reference service.
Specific studies and works of criticism are under the General Scholarship category, in which has also been included general Web resources dealing with modern Japanese literature. For those who wish a broad overview of modern Japanese literature, Donald Keene’s two-volume Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) provides both breadth and depth with a study of the primary genres as well as criticism. Another useful volume is J. Thomas Rimer’s A Reader’s Guide to Japanese Literature (New York: Kodansha International, 1988), a survey of both classical and modern literature with overviews of important authors and works. Insight into the workings of modern Japanese poetry is found in Makoto Ueda’s Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983), and Samuel Leiter’s Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2006) contains a number of entries discussing the continuity of theater into the modern period.
In terms of criticism, a large number of very good monographs and scholarly studies has appeared in recent years, reflecting the maturing of the discipline. Some are quite theoretical, others comparative in scope, and yet others thematic. Some of the important works dealing with narrative fiction include Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit’s Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishôsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1996), which is an important study of the I-Novel, and Dennis Washburn’s The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), which investigates the continuities that link classical with modern Japanese literature. Modern theater studies include both translations, such as David Goodman’s After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), as well as critical-historical studies, such as Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and Shûji Terayama’s Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shûji and Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). Leith Morton has provided a valuable study of modern poetry in his overview Modernism in Practice: An Introduction to Postwar Japanese Poetry (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).
Much of the scholarship taking place today in the field concerns specific movements or periods, and the Literary Histories section demonstrates both the variety of perspectives and approaches as well as the breadth of history represented in contemporary scholarship on modern Japanese literature. Historical studies include a panoply of topics, such as the emergence of the novel in the Meiji period (Janet Walker’s The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), the I-Novel (Edward Fowler’s The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishôsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), the war and its aftermath (Marlene J. Mayo, J. Thomas Rimer, and H. Eleanor Kerkham’s War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920–1960 [Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001]), translation and adaptation (J. Scott Miller’s Adaptations of Western Literature in Meiji Japan [New York: Palgrave, 2001]), and atomic bomb literature (John Whittier Treat’s Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Feminist approaches to the study of modern Japanese literature form a particularly strong area of English-language scholarship, and the bibliographical section Women and Literature includes a dozen studies that address aspects of women in modern literature, including women as subjects (Makoto Ueda’s The Mother of Dreams and Other Short Stories: Portrayals of Women in Modern Japanese Fiction (New York: Kodansha International, 1986) and women as writers (Tomoko Kuribayashi and Mizuho Terasawa’s The Outsider Within: Ten Essays on Modern Japanese Women Writers (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002).
Other topical areas of literary exploration expand our understanding beyond the usual scope. In Film and Literature this includes Keiko I. McDonald’s From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in Films (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), a work that examines over a dozen literary works and their film adaptations. Detective Fiction arose early in Japan and continues to be a popular genre, as Mark Silver outlines in his Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008). Peripheral literatures within Japan, such as that of minority Okinawans, are the focus of Michael S. Molasky and Steve Rabson in their book Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000) as well as Leith Morton in his work The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009).
A number of valuable Web resources are listed as well in this bibliography, although the nature of the Web makes it difficult to guarantee the longevity of the sites. The Japan Foundation Website (www.jpf.go.jp) is quite useful, both for information on contemporary scholarship but also for its fairly comprehensive online database listing works of Japanese literature in foreign translation. Mark Jewel’s Japanese literature site (www.jlit.net) maintains an ongoing chronology and gives a wealth of details for both modern and classical Japanese literature. Specific author Web pages are too numerous, and varied in quality, to note, but of Western Literature in Meiji Japan (New York: Palgrave, 2001), and atomic bomb literature (John Whittier Treat’s Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Feminist approaches to the study of modern Japanese literature form a particularly strong area of English-language scholarship, and the bibliographical section Women and Literature includes a dozen studies that address aspects of women in modern literature, including women as subjects (Makoto Ueda’s The Mother of Dreams and Other Short Stories: Portrayals of Women in Modern Japanese Fiction (New York: Kodansha International, 1986) and women as writers (Tomoko Kuribayashi and Mizuho Terasawa’s The Outsider Within: Ten Essays on Modern Japanese Women Writers (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002).
Other topical areas of literary exploration expand our understanding beyond the usual scope. In Film and Literature this includes Keiko I. McDonald’s From Book to Screen: Modern Japanese Literature in Films (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), a work that examines over a dozen literary works and their film adaptations. Detective Fiction arose early in Japan and continues to be a popular genre, as Mark Silver outlines in his Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Crime Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008). Peripheral literatures within Japan, such as that of minority Okinawans, are the focus of Michael S. Molasky and Steve Rabson in their book Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000) as well as Leith Morton in his work The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009).
A number of valuable Web resources are listed as well in this bibliography, although the nature of the Web makes it difficult to guarantee the longevity of the sites. The Japan Foundation Website (www.jpf.go.jp) is quite useful, both for information on contemporary scholarship but also for its fairly comprehensive online database listing works of Japanese literature in foreign translation. Mark Jewel’s Japanese literature site (www.jlit.net) maintains an ongoing chronology and gives a wealth of details for both modern and classical Japanese literature. Specific author Web pages are too numerous, and varied in quality, to note, but a good search engine will yield a variety of Internet resources, many with English pages as well.
Works by and about specific authors are found in the Select Bibliography of Authors and Translations section, under either Anthologies, General Authors, or Specific Authors, depending upon whether the work is a broad anthology, focuses on a few authors, or treats one individual author, respectively. The Anthologies section reflects the rather young state of the field, but in recent years several important anthologies have made modern literature available to an increasing number of non-Japanese readers. Primary among them is a very recent two-volume set edited by Van C. Gessel and J. Thomas Rimer, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 2007). This major anthology covers from the Meiji period to the 21st century and includes selections by major writers, poets, playwrights, and critics, many available for the first time in English translation. Two other more compact anthologies that have become classics are Van C. Gessel and Tomone Matsumoto’s The Shôwa Anthology: Modern Japanese Short Stories: 1929–1984 (New York: Kodansha International, 1989), and Hiroaki Sato, Burton Watson, and J. Thomas Rimer’s From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1981).
As for journals of note, there are three primary periodicals that focus, in part, on the study of modern Japanese literature. Monumenta Nipponica, an interdisciplinary journal serving as an international forum for research on Japanese culture and society, is published semiannually by Sophia University, Tokyo. It carries both original scholarly contributions on history, literature, art history, religion, and thought, and translations of important Japanese literary and historical sources. The Journal of Japanese Studies, published semiannually by the Society for Japanese Studies and housed at the University of Washington, publishes broad, exploratory articles suggesting new analyses and interpretations, substantial book reviews, translations of Japanese articles of particular interest, and occasional symposia. Japanese Language and Literature: Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, published semiannually by the Association of Teachers of Japanese, contains articles on Japanese language and literary topics as well as reviews of recent books.
In addition, the Library of Congress maintains a strong collection of scholarship on modern Japanese literature as well as works in translation, and major universities with programs in Japanese language usually have library resources devoted to modern literature.