Author: Editor

New Book Announcement: “The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon” by William C Hedberg

The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon, William C Hedberg (Columbia University Press, October 2019)
The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon, William C Hedberg (Columbia University Press, October 2019)

The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in 12th-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan in the early 17th century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work of Chinese fiction more important to both the development of early modern Japanese literature and the Japanese imagination of China than The Water Margin.

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New Book Announcement: “Campaign of Knowledge: US Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan” by Malin Johar Schueller

Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan, Malini Johar Schueller (Temple University Press, November 2019)
Campaigns of Knowledge: US Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan, Malini Johar Schueller (Temple University Press, November 2019)

The creation of a new school system in the Philippines in 1898 and educational reforms in occupied Japan, both with stated goals of democratization, speaks to a singular vision of America as savior, following its politics of violence with benevolent recuperation.

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New Book Announcement: “Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou” by David Chaffetz

Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou, David Chaffetz (Abbreviated Press, November 2019)
Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture In Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou, David Chaffetz (Abbreviated Press, November 2019)

The diva is a nearly universal phenomenon. Wherever poetry, music and mime have been practised with virtuosity, great women performers always take centre stage. Traditional Asian divas are however less well known and understood among English language readers than the great divas of Mozart and Puccini. Whether from Shiraz at the court of the Injuids, from Delhi during the twilight of the Moghuls, or from Yangzhou under the last Ming emperors, these Asian divas constitute the first identifiably modern women.

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New Book Announcement: “Forty-Seven Samurai: A Tale of Vengeance and Death in Haiku and Letters” by Hiroaki Sato

Forty-Seven Samurai: A Tale of Vengeance and Death in Haiku and Letters, Hiroaki Sato (Stone Bridge Press, November 2019)
Forty-Seven Samurai: A Tale of Vengeance and Death in Haiku and Letters, Hiroaki Sato (Stone Bridge Press, November 2019)

A remarkable and true tale of loyalty, vengeance, and ritual suicide… In the spring of 1701, the regional lord Asano Naganori wounded his supervising official, Kira Yoshinaka, during an important ceremony in the ruling shogunate’s Edo Castle and was at once condemned to death. Within two years, in the dead of winter, a band of forty-seven of Asano’s retainers avenged him by breaking into Yoshinaka’s mansion and killing him. Subsequently, all the men were sentenced to death but allowed to perform it honorably by seppuku.

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New Book Announcement: “Japanese American Millennials: Rethinking Generation, Community, and Diversity”, edited by Michael Omi, Dana Y Nakano and Jeffrey T Yamashita

Japanese American Millennials: Rethinking Generation, Community, and Diversity, Michael Omi (ed), Dana Y Nakano (ed), and Jeffrey T Yamashita (ed) (Temple University Press, November 2019)
Japanese American Millennials: Rethinking Generation, Community, and Diversity, Michael Omi (ed), Dana Y Nakano (ed), and Jeffrey T Yamashita (ed) (Temple University Press, November 2019)

Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials: Rethinking Generation, Community, and Diversity, captures the experiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate multiple social identities.

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New Book Announcement: “An American Bum in China” by Tom Carter

An American Bum in China, Tom Carter (Camphor Press, September 2019)
An American Bum in China, Tom Carter (Camphor Press, September 2019)

An American Bum in China: Featuring the bumblingly brilliant escapades of expatriate Matthew Evans is the remarkable but true story of an Iowan misfit. At the age of twenty-one, cancer survivor Evans flees his Mississippi River hometown of Muscatine and heads to China in pursuit of love. He ends up destitute, deported, working as a professor at a prestigious university, homeless, imprisoned, and an accidental participant in the 2014 Hong Kong protests.

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New Book Announcement: “The Boundless Sea: Self and History” by Gary Okihiro

The Boundless Sea: Self and History, Gary Y Okihiro (University of California Press, October 2019)
The Boundless Sea: Self and History, Gary Y Okihiro (University of California Press, October 2019)

The last book in a trilogy of explorations on space and time from a preeminent scholar, The Boundless Sea is Gary Y Okihiro’s most innovative yet. Whereas Okihiro’s previous books, Island World and Pineapple Culture, sought to deconstruct islands and continents, tropical and temperate zones, this book interrogates the assumed divides between space and time, memoir and history, and the historian and the writing of history.

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New Book Announcement: “The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s” by Masumi Izumi

The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s, Masumi Izumi (Temple University Press, September 2019)
The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s, Masumi Izumi (Temple University Press, September 2019)

The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971.

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New Book Announcement: “The Hell Screens” by Alvin Lu

The Hell Screens, Alvin Lu (Camphor Press, August 2019)
The Hell Screens, Alvin Lu (Camphor Press, August 2019)

Cheng-Ming, a Taiwanese American, rummages through the used-book stalls and market bins of Taipei. His object is no ordinary one; he’s searching obsessively for accounts of ghosts and spirits, suicides and murders in a city plagued by a rapist-killer and less tangible forces. Cheng-Ming is an outsider trying to unmask both the fugitive criminal and the otherworld of spiritual forces that are inexorably taking control of the city.

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