Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1498523692 ISBN 13: 9781498523691

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2019

Synopsis

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 Shōwa 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Barbara E. Thornbury is professor of Japanese studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Studies at Temple University.

Evelyn Schulz is professor of Japanese studies in the Department of Asian Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Review:

Overall, Tokyo does a great service by offering new insights to familiar texts and introducing other important work to a wider audience. It demonstrates the great value of close reading, by outlining the broad spatial dynamics of the city—center and periphery, yamanote and shitamachi, the network of waterways and the bay—and then fi lling in a wealth of streetlevel detail that contributes enormously to our understanding of these emphatically place-based texts. This level of detail makes even a mega-city such as Tokyo feel local and personal, revealing how, as Schulz writes, “transformations of urban space, topography, and culture” can function as “pivotal moments of (auto)biographical identity” (p. 71). Tokyo is a welcome addition to the body of scholarship on Japan’s urban culture. (The Journal of Japanese Studies)

Barbara E. Thornbury and Evelyn Schulz have put together a marvelous collection of essays on Tokyo in the Japanese cultural imagination, showing how the ‘memoryscape’ of this great city has dominated and permeated thinking on modern life. The contributors are rigorous and creative in analyzing depictions of Tokyo in literature and film from the bubble economy to the ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s and beyond. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to interrogate urban space, memory-making, and the multifaceted history of Tokyo as a built physical location as well as a mental construct. (Rachael Hutchinson, University of Delaware)

The essays in this cohesive, stimulating volume reveal an imaginative history of Tokyo, a city with few landmark monuments but a host of collective and personal memories that inspire nostalgia and belonging, protest and defeat, willful amnesia and creative recollection. This is an innovative volume that teaches us ways to analyze space, place, and memory in creative work. (Jan Bardsley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

It is a perhaps inevitable irony that Tokyo, the most combustible of cities, provides such a rich repository of memories. The consequent dynamics and contradictions are dissected and discussed by the contributors to this nuanced and multi-layered analysis of the relationship between Tokyo and its inhabitants as expressed in writing and film. This collection provides an illuminating exploration of how memory both informs and disrupts this relationship, and in so doing it deepens our understanding more broadly of the city, indeed of all cities, and the creative self. (Paul Waley, University of Leeds)

This book is inspirational reading for the preparation of a trip to Tokyo and for long intercontinental flights from North America and Europe to the city. Inspired by the essays, scientific travellers from the architecture and urban planning community will certainly benefit from reading this book, beyond the visual they expect to see. (disP - The Planning Review)

This poignant collection by eight leading scholars analyzes how literature and films from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century reveal the layers of individual and collective memories underlying contemporary Tokyo. More than most other cities, Tokyo has been destroyed and rebuilt in modernization efforts, war, and natural disasters. Because of this, it is a construct through which to view the advances and contractions of Japanese national development. This collection shows the indelible effect that living and writing in Tokyo has had on artistic production. (Alisa Freedman, University of Oregon)

About this edition

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1498523692
• ISBN 13: 9781498523691
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 212
• Editor: Thornbury Barbara E., Schulz Evelyn