Tokyo

Memory, Imagination, and the City

Barbara E. Thornbury, Evelyn Schulz

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498523684
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City is a collection of eight essays that explore Tokyo urban space from the perspective of memory in works of the imagination—novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and films. Written by scholars of Japanese studies based in England, Germany, Japan, and the United States, the book focuses on texts produced in Japan since the 1980s. The closing years of the Showa period (1926-1989) were a watershed decade of spatial transformation in Tokyo. It was also a time (in Japan, as elsewhere) when conversations about the nature of memory—historical, cultural, collective, and individual—intensified. The contributors to the volume share the view that works of the imagination are constitutive elements of how cities are experienced and perceived. Each of the essays responds to the growing interest in studies on Tokyo with a literary-cultural orientation.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Pulling the Thorns of Suffering
• Pavane for a Dead Princess, or Exploring Geographies of the City, the Mind, and the Social
• On Möbius Strips, Ruins, and Memory
• Mapping Environments of Memory, Nostalgia, and Emotions in “Tokyo Spatial (Auto)biographies”
• Held Hostage to History
• The Tokyo Cityscape, Sites of Memory, and Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Café Lumière
• Remaking Tayama Katai’s Futon in Nakajima Kyōko’s FUTON
• The Child of Memory
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors