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In general terms, this book explores the ontological status of the metaphysical world as a construct of language, culture, and experience. For the individual this is represented as the soul, the self, or as “narrative;” for the collective (culture, society) it becomes the collective unconscious, the World Soul, the mythological archetype. Specifically, this book examines how these considerations color Murakami’s depictions of the individual and collective mind/soul, which (as constructs of language) shift constantly between the tangible and the intangible, yet within the context of his literary landscape are undeniably real.

The Pacific Ocean has long inspired literary imaginings of promising worlds, including Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. This book asks how literary writers imagine ocean futures more recently, providing a perspective on imagination and art in the context that the sweeping environmental changes are reshaping life possibilities in the Pacific. It looks at contemporary poetry, short stories, art, and journalistic writings from Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai‘i, among other sites, exploring their imaginative accounts of present life and futures in varied sites where people live closely with environmental loss. These literary writings are crafted to offer relationships with the future that include hope, an awareness of the future as a site of openness and promise. Literary writers evoke hope not by turning away from the realities of environmental loss and damage but rather through attunement to the beings, commitments, and struggles of the present world and the futures that such a world might shape. Drawing together ecocriticism and theories of hope, this book makes an argument for hope as a creative and critical engagement with present and past environmental constraints, including myriad forms of loss. It also reflects on the critical approaches that hope as an analytic category opens up for the study of environmental literature. Through this category, the book develops a method for reading literary works as creative accounts of present life and futures that offer hope, among their modes of engagement with the ocean.

How do you write yourself into a literature that doesn’t know you exist? This was the conundrum confronted by Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992), who counted himself among the buraku-min, Japan’s largest minority. His answer brought the histories and rhetorical traditions of buraku writing into the high culture of Japanese literature for the first time and helped establish him as the most canonical writer born in postwar Japan. This book shows how the writer’s exploration of buraku led to a unique blend of fiction and ethnography—which amounted to nothing less than a reimagining of modern Japanese literature. The book develops a parallax view of Nakagami’s achievement, allowing us to see him much as he saw himself, as a writer whose accomplishments traversed both buraku literary arts and high literary culture in Japan. As the text considers the ways in which Nakagami and other twentieth-century writers used ethnography to shape Japanese literature, it reveals how ideas about language also imagined a transfigured relation to mainstream culture and politics. This analysis of the resulting “rhetorical activism” lays bare Nakagami’s unique blending of literature and ethnography within the context of twentieth-century ideas about race, ethnicity, and citizenship—in Japan, but also on an international scale.

First published in Mexico in 1995 as La bala perdida, The Stray Bullet presents a thorough and compelling account of William S Burroughs’ Mexico experience. Author Jorge García-Robles makes a convincing case that Mexico, as escape route, inspiration and alternative universe, was essential to Burroughs’ development as a writer, as well as the scene of the definitive incident in the writer’s life, his accidental shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer. Beginning with a description of the circumstances that led Burroughs to move to Mexico, the book covers the author’s initial elation at settling into this foreign land, followed by his growing disillusionment and descent into various addictions as he discovered his literary vocation. Reconstructing the environment of 1950s Mexico through Burroughs’ correspondence and writings, reports from the Mexican press, descriptions of the cultural and political panorama of the era and interviews with Burroughs’ Mexico acquaintances, García-Robles paints a vivid picture of the world that spawned the Beat novelist’s career. Although this period of Burroughs’ life has been written on by others, García-Robles’ version provides a uniquely Mexican perspective. García-Robles, who has translated the Burroughs-Ginsberg collaboration The Yagé Letters into Spanish, has a talent for recreating the Mexico of the 1950s. Burroughs cooperated with the author while La bala perdida was being written and in fact contributed an essay about the Mexican lawyer who arranged his quick release from prison after the shooting incident. The book also includes previously unpublished letters written by Burroughs from Mexico.

This memoir traces a boy’s childhood and its intersection with the rise of the Japanese empire and World War II. In twelve chapters that visit and revisit critical points in his boyhood, this book presents a vanished time and place through the eyes of an accomplished poet. Recounting memories from youth, the text captures the full range of an internal life as a boy, shifting between experiences and descriptions of childhood friendships, games, songs, and school. The text also discusses the budding awareness of his sexual preference for men, providing a rich exploration of one man’s early queer life in a place where modern, Western-influenced models of gay identity were still unknown. Growing up poor in rural southwestern Japan, far from the urban life that many others have written about, the book’s author experienced a reality rarely portrayed in literature. The book paints a vivid portrait of rural Japan, full of oral tradition, superstition, and remnants of customs that have quickly disappeared in postwar Japan.

Despite its centuries-long tradition of literary and artistic depictions of love between men, around the fin-de siècle Japanese culture began to portray same-sex desire as immoral. This textlooks at the response to this mindset during the critical era of cultural ferment between the two world wars as a number of Japanese writers challenged the idea of love and desire between men as pathological. This book focuses on key writers, examining how they experimented with new language, genres, and ideas to find fresh ways to represent love and desire between men. It traces the personal and literary relationships between contemporaries such as the poet Murayama Kaita, the mystery writers Edogawa Ranpo and Hamao Shir, the anthropologist Iwata Jun’ichi, and the avant-garde innovator Inagaki Taruho. The book shows how these authors interjected the subject of male—male desire into discussions of modern art, aesthetics, and perversity. It also explores the impact of their efforts on contemporary Japanese culture, including the development of the tropes of male homoeroticism that recur so often in Japanese girls’ manga about bishōnen love.