Often considered an exotic garment of "traditional Japan," the kimono is in fact a vibrant part of Japanese modernity, playing an integral role in literature and film throughout the twentieth century. Reading the Kimono in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature and Film is the first extended study to offer new ways of interpreting textual and visual narratives through "kimono language"--what these garments communicate within their literary, historical, and cultural contexts. Kimonos on the page and screen do much more than create verisimilitude or function as one-dimensional symbols. They go beyond simply indicating the wearer's age, gender, class, and taste; as eloquent, heterogeneous objects, they speak of wartime and postwar histories and shed light on everything from gender politics to censorship. By reclaiming "kimono language"--once a powerful shared vernacular--Michiko Suzuki accesses inner lives of characters, hidden plot points, intertextual meanings, resistant messages, and social commentary. Reading the Kimono examines modern Japanese literary works and their cinematic adaptations, including Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's canonical novel, The Makioka Sisters, and its film versions, one screened under the US Occupation and another directed by Ichikawa Kon in 1983. It also investigates Kōda Aya's Kimono and Flowing, as well as Naruse Mikio's 1956 film adaptation of the latter. Reading the Kimono additionally advances the study of women writers by discussing texts by Tsuboi Sakae and Miyao Tomiko, authors often overlooked in scholarship despite their award-winning, bestselling stature. Through her analysis of stories and their afterlives, Suzuki offers a fresh view of the kimono as complex "material" to be read. She asks broader questions about the act of interpretation, what it means to explore both texts and textiles as inherently dynamic objects, shaped by context and considered differently over time. Reading the Kimono is at once an engaging history of the modern kimono and its representation, and a significant study of twentieth-century Japanese literature and film.

"High-quality color photographs and period pictures illustrate this sumptuous volume, which should interest experts and laymen alike." --Choice The Japanese kimono is celebrated worldwide for its elegant, distinctive silhouette. Though quintessentially Japanese, the kimono form has influenced fashion designers around the globe. The 150 stunning kimonos in this beautifully illustrated book were created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they include formal, semi-formal, and casual kimono, haori jackets, and under-kimono (juban) worn by men, women, and children. Some of the garments reflect historical styles of design and techniques, while others illustrate a dramatic break with aspects of kimono tradition, as themes and designs from Western art began to predominate over Japanese references. The book, published to accompany a major traveling exhibition, traces the history of the kimono and illustartes the variety of colors, techniques, and designs used in creating this beautiful and symbolic garment. The kimonos featured here are drawn from the internationally renowned Montgomery Collection of Lugano, Switzerland.

What is the kimono? Everyday garment? Art object? Symbol of Japan? As this book shows, the kimono has served all of these roles, its meaning changing across time and with the perspective of the wearer or viewer. Kimono: A Modern History begins by exposing the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century foundations of the modern kimono fashion industry. It explores the crossover between ‘art’ and ‘fashion’ in this period at the hands of famous Japanese painters who worked with clothing pattern books and painted directly onto garments. With Japan’s exposure to Western fashion in the nineteenth century, and Westerners’ exposure to Japanese modes of dress and design, the kimono took on new associations and came to symbolize an exotic culture and an alluring female form. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the kimono industry was sustained through government support. The line between fashion and art became blurred as kimonos produced by famous designers were collected for their beauty and displayed in museums, rather than being worn as clothing. Today, the kimono has once again taken on new dimensions, as the Internet and social media proliferate images of the kimono as a versatile garment to be integrated into a range of individual styles. Kimono: A Modern History, the inspiration for a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,not only tells the story of a distinctive garment’s ever-changing functions and image, but provides a novel perspective on Japan’s modernization and encounter with the West.

A hilarious story of one man’s obsession and a brilliant reckoning of a nation’s cultural confusion—from a master Japanese novelist. When twenty-eight-year-old Joji first lays eyes upon the teenage waitress Naomi, he is instantly smitten by her exotic, almost Western appearance. Determined to transform her into the perfect wife and to whisk her away from the seamy underbelly of post-World War I Tokyo, Joji adopts and ultimately marries Naomi, paying for English and music lessons that promise to mold her into his ideal companion. But as she grows older, Joji discovers that Naomi is far from the naïve girl of his fantasies. And, in Tanizaki’s masterpiece of lurid obsession, passion quickly descends into comically helpless masochism.

Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture is a literary and cultural history of love and female identity in Japan during the 1910s-30s.

Fashion ingenue, magazine editor, kimono designer, femme fatale, prize-winning writer--Uno Chiyo has becomeone of twentieth-century Japan's most accomplished and celebrated women. In this two-part volume, Rebecca L. Copeland offers Western readers a fascinating portrait of Uno's life along with translations of three of her distinctive works of short fiction. Part One depicts Uno's sometimes turbulent passage from obscurity in a small village to national literary prominence. There are the early years under her father's stern turelage; the first scandalous, failed romance which cost her her job as a schoolteacher; her apprenticeship at Enrakuken, the coffee shop of the literary elite whose ranks she laters joined as a resident of the "Magome Literati Village"; her series of passionate and troubled relationships and marriages. Throughout, Dr. Copeland focuses on the evolution of Uno's art and discusses her major works, paying special attention to the effect being female had on Uno's development as a writer. The three stories in Part Two are examples of Uno's work at its finest. "The Puppet Maker" (1942), a much-admired reflection on art and life, describes an encounter with a venerable carver of puppets. "The Sound of the Wind" (1969) is the tale of a wife at the turn of the century who willingly denies her own needs. "This Powder Box" (1966) shows a progressive career woman coming to terms with an old love affair. At once compelling and lyrical, the stories are a masterful interpretation of tradition, of women, and of self-fulfullment. The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo will engage both specialists and general readers interested in twentieth-century Japan, literature, and women's issues.

This work discusses literary depictions of mass transit in 20th century Tokyo in the decades preceding WWII. It cuts across literary and historical/sociological analysis, and contributes to the growing body of work examining Japanese urbanism, gender, and modernism.