Maruzen eBook Library
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Maruzen eBook LibraryMaruzen eBook Library provides access to Japanese e-books purchased by the Boston University Libraries.
Featured Titles - Maruzen
About this Guide
This Research Guide will help you find Japanese language and literature resources available thru the BU Libraries. Here you will find information on:
- Language resources - dictionaries and grammar books
- Background information - guides, encyclopedias, biographies
- Open Access resources including websites and digital collections
- Japanese related programs at Boston University
Featured Resources
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JapanKnowledgeJapanKnowledge is an extensive database, mostly in Japanese, with information about Japanese language, culture, history, and more. It Includes encyclopedias, dictionaries, ebooks, news articles, and multimedia.
Note: Please be sure to log out by clicking logout button 
when finished to end session.
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Japanese Studies Spotlight -- from the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese LIbrary ResourcesThe NCC is collaborating with institutions and scholars to release a monthly series on our blog entitled Japanese Studies Spotlight. These features showcase exciting online collections available to researchers and students in Japanese Studies, introducing the archive or project, describing their contents, and demonstrating how they can be usefully engaged in research or in the classroom.
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Notable Japanese Collections in North AmericaThe purpose of this website is to help scholars and librarians identify notable Japanese Studies collections in North American libraries and cultural institutions. It also serves as a pilot project toward building a comprehensive database that charts all print and digital materials, including unprocessed or partially processed collections, held at North American research organizations.
New Books
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A Companion to World Literature by A Companion to World Literature is a far-reaching and sustained study of key authors, texts, and topics from around the world and throughout history. Six comprehensive volumes present essays from over 300 prominent international scholars focusing on many aspects of this vast and burgeoning field of literature, from its ancient origins to the most modern narratives.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2020 -
Longing and Other Stories by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is one of the most eminent Japanese writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his investigations of family dynamics, eroticism, and cultural identity. Most acclaimed for his postwar novels such as The Makioka Sisters and The Key, Tanizaki made his literary debut in 1910. This book presents three powerful stories of family life from the first decade of Tanizaki's career that foreshadow the themes the great writer would go on to explore. "Longing" recounts the fantastic journey of a precocious young boy through an eerie nighttime landscape. Replete with striking natural images and uncanny human encounters, it ends with a striking revelation. "Sorrows of a Heretic" follows a university student and aspiring novelist who lives in degrading poverty in a Tokyo tenement. Ambitious and tormented, the young man rebels against his family against a backdrop of sickness and death. "The Story of an Unhappy Mother" describes a vivacious but self-centered woman's drastic transformation after a freak accident involving her son and daughter-in-law. Written in different genres, the three stories are united by a focus on mothers and sons and a concern for Japan's traditional culture in the face of Westernization. The longtime Tanizaki translators Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy masterfully bring these important works to an Anglophone audience.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2022 -
An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura's An I-Novel is a semi-autobiographical work that takes place over the course of a single day in the 1980s. Minae is a Japanese expatriate graduate student who has lived in the United States for two decades but turned her back on the English language and American culture. After a phone call from her older sister reminds her that it is the twentieth anniversary of their family's arrival in New York, she spends the day reflecting in solitude and over the phone with her sister about their life in the United States, trying to break the news that she has decided to go back to Japan and become a writer in her mother tongue. Published in 1995, this formally daring novel radically broke with Japanese literary tradition. It liberally incorporated English words and phrases, and the entire text was printed horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left. In a luminous meditation on how a person becomes a writer, Mizumura transforms the ?I-novel,? a Japanese confessional genre that toys with fictionalization. An I-Novel tells the story of two sisters while taking up urgent questions of identity, race, and language. Above all, it considers what it means to write in the era of the hegemony of English?and what it means to be a writer of Japanese in particular. Juliet Winters Carpenter masterfully renders a novel that once appeared untranslatable into English.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2021 -
In the Shelter of the Pine: A Memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and Tokugawa Japan by In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ōgimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai for whom she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Machiko assisted Yoshiyasu in his ascent to the rank of chief adjutant to the Tokugawa shogun. She kept him in good graces with the imperial court, enabled him to study poetry with aristocratic teachers and have his compositions read by the retired emperor, and gave birth to two of his sons. Writing after Yoshiyasu's retirement, she recalled it all--from the glittering formal visits of the shogun and his entourage to the passage of the seasons as seen from her apartments in the Yanagisawa mansion. In the Shelter of the Pine is the most significant work of literature by a woman of Japan's early modern era. Featuring Machiko's keen eye for detail, strong narrative voice, and polished prose studded with allusions to Chinese and Japanese classics, this memoir sheds light on everything from the social world of the Tokugawa elite to the role of literature in women's lives. Machiko modeled her story on The Tale of Genji, illustrating how the eleventh-century classic continued to inspire its female readers and provide them with the means to make sense of their experiences. Elegant, poetic, and revealing, In the Shelter of the Pine is a vivid portrait of a distant world and a vital addition to the canon of Japanese literature available in English.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2021 -
The Tale of Genji and Its Chinese Precursors: Beyond the Boundaries of Nation, Class, and Gender by In The Tale of Genji and its Chinese Precursors: Beyond the Boundaries of Nation, Class, and Gender, Jindan Ni departs from the view of The Tale of Genji as a product of Japanese literary tradition devoid of Chinese and Buddhist influences. Combining close reading, the archival work of Japanese and Chinese scholars, and comparative literary theory, Ni argues that Murasaki Shikibu avoided the constraint of a single literary tradition by drawing on Chinese intertexts. Ni's account reveals the heterogeneity that makes The Tale of Genji a masterpiece with enduring appeal.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2020 -
Disruptions of Daily Life: Japanese Literary Modernism in the World by Disruptions of Daily Life explores the mass media landscape of early twentieth century in order to uncover the subversive societal impact of four major Japanese authors: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yokomitsu Riichi, Kawabata Yasunari, and Hirabayashi Taiko. Arthur Mitchell examines this literature against global realities through a modernist lens, studying an alternative modernism that challenges the Western European model. Through broad surveys of discussions surrounding Japanese life in the 1920s, Mitchell locates and examines flourishing divergent ideologies of the early twentieth century such as gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. He unravels how the narrative and linguistic strategies of modernist texts interrogated the innocence of this language, disrupting their hold on people's imagined relationship to daily life. These modernist works often discursively displaced the authority of their own claims by inadvertently exposing the global epistemology of East vs. West. Mitchell's reading of these formalist texts expands modernism studies into a more translational dialogue by locating subversions within the local historical culture and allowing readers to make connections to the time and place in which the texts were written. In highlighting the unbreakable link between literature and society, Disruptions of Daily Life reaffirms the value of modernist fiction and its ability to make us aware of how realities are constructed--and how those realities can be changed.Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2020
Librarian
Barbara Maratos
Contact:
Boston University Libraries
bkmarato@bu.edu
bkmarato@bu.edu
Subjects: Language & Linguistics, Literature