Music in Modern Japanese and Hebrew Literatures

Weaving Sounds into Words

Shirah Malka Cohen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040339411
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Music in Modern Japanese and Hebrew Literatures examines the place of classical music in early 20th-century Japanese and Hebrew literatures. As this book shows, both Japanese and Hebrew writers of the period made use of Western classical music in their novels and short stories in order to explore issues of belonging, cultural and literary identity, and artistic integrity. Hence, by analysing the appearance of such music in the writing of Japanese writers, such as Nagai Kaf?, Shiga Naoya and Uchida Hyakken, and Hebrew writers, such as Leah Goldberg, Gershon Shofman, and Ya'akov Horowiz, this book sets an intriguing narrative of writers' interaction with a modernizing world and their struggles to make sense of multitudes of cultural influences. Through such struggles, these Japanese and Hebrew writers created unique visions of literature that constitute, this book argues, a cosmopolitan literary sphere. In looking into these matters, this book aims to recontextualize the place of Japanese and Hebrew literatures of the early 20th century in relation to each other as well as European culture and to create a new and exciting approach to the study of World Literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Tale of Two Organs: The Use of Musical Forms in the Works of Gershon Shofman and Shimazaki Tōson
• 2 Soirée à l’Opéra: Nagai Kafū and Leah Goldberg Go to the Opera
• 3 The Music of Mechanical Ghosts: Literature Meets the Gramophone and the Radio
• 4 Mechanical Music, Horror, and the Modern Danse Macabre: A Cyclical View of History as a Coping Mechanism in Ya’akov Horowiz’s ‘Muzika modernit’
• 5 The Music of the Unconscious: Music and the Literary Expression of the Self
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Translation of “A Night at the Latin Quarter” from French Tales by Nagai Kafū (1908)
• Appendix B: Translation of “Revenge of a Hand Organ” by Gershon Shofman (1910)
• Appendix C: Translation of “Modern Music” by Ya’akov Horowiz (1940)
• Appendix D: Translation of “Sarasate’s Recording” by Uchida Hyakken (1948)
• Index