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This collection of ecocritical essays is focused on the work of Japan's foremost writer on environment and culture, Ishimure Michiko. Ishimure is known for her pioneering trilogy that exposed the Minamata Disease incident and the nature of modern industrial pollution. She is also regarded by many critics as Japan's most original and important literary writer. Ishimure has written over 50 volumes in a wide range of genres, including novels, Noh drama, poetry, children's stories, essays, and mixed-genre writing. This collection brings together the work of scholars from Japan, the U.S., and Canada who are authorities on Ishimure's writing. Contributors discuss Ishimure's writing in the context of the latest issues in ecocritical theory, arguing for an expanded, more-than-Western understanding of literature, theory, and environmental responsibility. It will help to relate various environmental, cultural, and ecocritical issues, ranging from the events at Minamata to those at Fukushima, and consider how they point to future developments.
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Bruce Allen and Yuki Masami
Chapter 1: The World of Kugai Jodo / Watanabe Kyoji
Chapter 2: Antiquity and Modernity of the Shiranui Sea / Ikezawa Natsuki
Chapter 3: The Danger of a Single Story: Ishimure Michiko’s Literary Approach to the Minamata Disease Incident / Yuki Masami
Chapter 4: Mapping Modernity: Home and the World in Ishimure Michiko’s Kugai Jodo / Toyosato Mayumi
Chapter 5: Literature Without Us / Christine Marran
Chapter 6: Ishimure Michiko as Contemporary Thinker / Iwaoka Nakamasa
Chapter 7: Atonement and At-one-ment: From Story of the Sea of Camellias to Lake of Heaven / Patrick Murphy
Chapter 8: Ishimure Michiko and Global Ecocriticism / Karen Thornber
Chapter 9: Another World in This World: Slow Violence, Environmental Time, and the Decolonial Imagination in Ishimure Michiko’s Villages of the Gods / Livia Monnet
Chapter 10: The Noh Imagination in Shiranui and the Work of Ishimure Michiko / Bruce Allen
Chapter 11: Shiranui: A Contemporary Noh Play / A Translation by Aihara Yuko and Bruce Allen
About the Editors and Contributors
Bruce Allen is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Seisen University, Tokyo. Yuki Masami is a professor at Kanazawa University where she teaches environmental literature and English as a foreign language.
"I was in the room when Ishimure Michiko magically read her work, for the first time, to an international audience at the ASLE-US and ASLE-J symposium in Hawai'i in the summer of 1996 – and I also watched Ishimure-san as she smiled at a panel of young Japanese scholars who presented short papers about her work at the same conference. This extraordinary collection of scholarly articles and literary translations, published nearly twenty years after the 1996 symposium, offers a fitting tribute to the multidimensionality of Ishimure's literary work and to the growing sophistication of ecocriticism. I enjoyed this book tremendously and learned a lot from it."
– Scott Slovic, University of Idaho
