The three parts of Kojiki consist of the “kamukatari” myths of divine beings and the “amagatari-uta” songs of emperors, and there are narrative correspondences between them. The episode of Suseri-bime's anger at Ōkuninushi for his courtship visit to Nunakawa-hime is closely parallel with that of Princess Ihano-hime's jealousy in the chapter of Emperor Nintoku. The happy ending of the episode—reconciliation of the divine couple through Ōkuninushi's drinking song—is faithfully repeated in the appeasement of the emperor's anger by means of Princess Wakakusakabe's drinking song in the chapter of Emperor Yūryaku. In this way the myths of gods and goddesses are gradually transformed into the stories of the imperial family from the first to the third volumes of Kojiki to authorize the divine origin of emperors.
The elegy of Prince Hinashi-no-Mikoto is written in the form of a Chinese requiem, but it becomes peculiarly lyrical in some passages. Such lyrical moments are often called “objectively emotional” or “pluralistic in perspective” because they seem to be written from a compound of first-person and third-person viewpoints. Although this elegiac style has been aesthetically analyzed, it is little known that it is derived from requiems on the frontiers of East Asia. This article will focus on the funeral rites of Bai people, an ethnic group in China, to trace the origin of the elegy. Their shamanistic ritual songs are precisely as lyrical and “pluralistic in perspective” as the Japanese funeral poem.
In Kokusenya-kassen, Chikamatsu-Monzaemon's puppet play, the main character Watōnai first appears as an immature man unfit for battle. Encouraged and guided by his old mother, however, he goes to China in the cause of the reconstruction of the Ming dynasty. In the most dramatic scene of the third act he is driven to despair and fury by his mother's suicide and makes up his mind to be reborn as a brave man. This narrative pattern of Chikamatsu's play provided a model for numerous stories of a brave hero.
The aim of this article is to tentatively restore the lost manuscript of Zhang Wojun's Chinese translation of Sōseki Natsume's Bungaku-ron which was published by a Shanghai publisher Shenzhou-guoguang-she in 1931. Since there is no authorized edition of Bungaku-ron, it is very difficult to know what the author's real intention is. This is why Zhang had to turn to the two different texts for translation; the abridged edition posthumously issued and the version reprinted in The Complete Works of Sōseki Natsume. Moreover his work of translation was subtly inflected by historical and cultural factors during the 1930s in China. The reconstructed manuscript will reveal a complicated trajectory through which it was both textually and contextually overdetermined.
First-generation Japanese-American women were generally represented as “women of meritorious deeds,” “poor victims,” or “sexual degenerates.” But in “California-monogatari” (1937) Toshiko Tamura offered a new image of immigrant women. The story is centered on a cultural gap between the first-generation mother and the second-generation daughter. While the mother is morbidly obsessed with the vision of her country, her daughter strategically takes advantage of exoticism such as Oriental beauty. Thus uniquely Tamura represented immigrant women as tactical survivors in the diaspora.