Displaying the top 100 results that match your query. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/rssapi.jsp?Re=3295&N=3+5238 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=809850 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1577556 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=673170 Murasaki Shikibus The Tale of Genji, written in Japan in the early eleventh century, is acknowledged to be one of Japans greatest literary achievements, and sometimes thought of as the worlds first novel. This introduction to the Genji sketches its cultural background, offers detailed analysis of the text, including language and style, and traces the history of its reception through nine centuries of cultural change.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=451247 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=547181 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1511878 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=265580 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1511877 This unique collection presents the verse - much of it translated for the first time - of fourteen eminent Chinese Buddhist poet monks. Featuring the original Chinese as well as English translations and historical introductions by Burton Watson, J.P. Seaton, Paul Hansen, James Sanford, and the editors, this book provides an appreciation and understanding of this elegant and traditional expression of spirituality. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=228108 When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lias parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run Quiet War in Laos. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness and healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while the medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lias doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness qaug dab peg - the spirit catches you and you fall down - and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down moves from hospital corridors to healing ceremonies, and from the hill country of Laos to the living rooms of Merced, uncovering in its path the complex sources and implications of two dramatically clashing worldviews.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=212971 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=205859 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=233202 Taigu Ryokan (1758-1831) remains one of the most popular figures in Japanese Buddhist history. Despite his religious and artistic sophistication (he excelled in scriptural studies, in calligraphy, and in poetry), Ryokan referred to himself as Great Fool, refusing to place himself within any established religious institution. In contrast to Zen masters of his time who presided over large monasteries, trained students, or produced recondite treatises, Ryokan followed a life of mendicancy in the countryside. Instead of delivering sermons, he expressed himself through kanshi (poems composed in classical Chinese) and waka (poems in Japanese syllabary) and could typically be found playing with the village children in the course of his daily rounds of begging. Great Fool is the first study in a Western language to offer a comprehensive picture of the legendary poet-monk and his oeuvre. It includes not only an extensive collection of the masters kanshi, topically arranged to facilitate an appreciation of Ryokans colorful world, but selections of his waka, essays, and letters. The volume also presents for the first time in English the Ryokan zenji kiwa (Curious Accounts of the Zen Master Ryokan), a firsthand source composed by a former student less than sixteen years after Ryokans death. Consisting of anecdotes and episodes, sketches from Ryokans everyday life, the Curious Accounts is invaluable for showing how Ryokan was understood and remembered by his contemporaries. To further assist the reader, three introductory essays approach Ryokan from the diverse perspectives of his personal history and literary work.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=141608 From Einstein and Truman to Sartre and Derrida, many have declared the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be decisive events in human history. None, however, have more acutely understood or perceptively critiqued the consequences of nuclear war than Japanese writers. Until now the responses of the one people subjected to nuclear war have gone largely unknown outside of Japan. In this first complete study of the nuclear theme in Japanese intellectual and artistic life, John Whittier Treat shows how much we have to learn from Japanese writers and artists about the substance and meaning of the nuclear age. Treat recounts the controversial history of Japanese public discourse around Hiroshima and Nagasaki - a discourse alternatively celebrated and censored - from August 6, 1945, to the present day. He includes works from the earliest survivor writers, including Hara Tamiki and Ota Yoko, to such important Japanese intellectuals today as Oe Kenzaburo and Oda Makoto. Treat summarizes the Japanese contribution to such ongoing international debates as the crisis of modern ethics, the relationship of experience to memory, and the possibility of writing history. This Japanese perspective, he shows, both confirms and amends many of the assertions made in the West on the shift that the death camps and nuclear weapons have jointly signaled for the modern world and for the future.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=97429 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=254108 With Seeds in the Heart, Donald Keene has completed his masterful, four-volume survey of Japanese literature from the earliest times to 1970 - a major achievement of one of the worlds most illustrious careers in literary criticism. Keene, the preeminent presenter of Japanese culture to the West, has long understood the key that literature holds to revealing a cultures sensibilities. This volume, like the first three, will be hailed as definitive (said Edwin O. Reischauer) as Keene employs his prodigious wealth of knowledge, depth of critical insight, and gift for narrative to guide us through one thousand years of a literary history that both defined the unique properties of Japanese prosody and prose, and produced some of its greatest works: the robust and grand poetry of the Manyoshu; the subtle and sparse perfection of the thirty-one syllable waka poem; The Tale of the Genji, still regarded as one of the greatest novels in world literature; the richly distilled poetic texts of the fifteenth-century No dramas; and the vast canvases of the medieval war tales, such as The Tale of the Heike. Detailed textual examinations of these and many other works at once present new scholarship to the expert and allow the lay reader to understand and enjoy Keenes narrative without prior knowledge of Japanese history. Above all, the author shows us the relevance this great body of literature has for all centuries; as the tenth-century poet Tsurayuki said, Japanese poetry has its seeds in the human heart.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=135916 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=197114 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=21370 This book has a dual purpose. The first is to present in a new English translation 255 representative hokku (or haiku) poems of Matsuo Basho (1644-94), the Japanese poet who is generally considered the most influential figure in the history of the genre. The second is to make available in English a wide spectrum of Japanese critical commentary on the poems over the last three hundred years. The hokku are arranged in chronological order, so the reader can trace the gradual process through which the poet perfected his art. Basho was a tireless experimenter who explored the potential of his poetic form throughout his career, and the results of his explorations are everywhere visible in his work. The translated poems are grouped by year of composition (except for three longer groupings before 1675). Each group is introduced by a biographical section reviewing the events in Bashos life during that year. The author also provides the original Japanese in romanization; a literal, word-for-word translation; and, when necessary, an explanatory note dealing with specific words and names, contemporary customs, and the like. Because of Bashos great fame, a massive amount of critical commentary has been written on his poems. For each poem, the author provides a selection of representative excerpts from commentaries, showing how different generations (or different scholars within the same generation) have approached Bashos poems in different ways. These commentaries point up the fact that a hokku, consisting of only seventeen syllables, invites the active participation of the reader. The hokku poet leaves the poem unfinished, so to speak, and each reader is expected to complete it with a personal interpretation. The Introduction discusses the basic nature of hokku, Bashos contribution to its development, the history of Basho criticism, problems of translation, and other useful information. The book also includes a glossary of literary terms, indexes of the complete poems in English and romanized Japanese, biographical notes on commentators, and a selected bibliography. All in all, the book is both a collection of great poetry in a new translation and a comprehensive, rich guide to a deeper appreciation of that poetry. The book is illustrated with 7 line drawings and examples of Bashos calligraphy and 6 maps.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=230832 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=174524 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=210095 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=81428 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=135922 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=135927 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=276577 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=135265 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=92189 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=92191 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=170762 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=369888