Foodscapes of Contemporary Japanese Women Writers: An Ecocritical Journey around the Hearth of Modernity (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment)

Translated from Japanese, this study exposes English-language scholars to the complexities of the relationship between food, culture, the environment, and literature in Japan. Yuki explores the systems of value surrounding food as expressed in four popular Japanese female writers: Ishimure Michiko, Taguchi Randy, Morisaki Kazue, and Nashiki Kaho. "A fascinating study of the frequently fraught relationships among food, literature, the environment, and modernity, Yuki Masami's Foodscapes of Contemporary Japanese Women Writers is an innovative contribution to the growing body of writing on Japanese literature and the environment. The book's distinctive format, combining pioneering analyzes of creative work by Ishimure Michiko, Taguchi Randy, Morisaki Kazue, and Nashiki Kaho with transcripts of interviews with these key environmentally engaged writers, thus bringing to the table multiple voices, offers a bounty of resources for scholars and enthusiasts of Japan, Japanese literature and culture, food studies, and ecocriticism alike."--Karen L. Thornber, Professor of Comparative Literature and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, USA "A fine example of fourth-wave ecocriticism in its focus on both the discourse and the material nature of food, Masami's book also reminds me of Ishimure's own work in its multidimensional, many-voiced texture. Readers will appreciate how the book so gracefully, so lightly, introduces Japanese environmental history, food culture, gendered experience, and ideas of sustainability - in addition to sharing the words and ideas of several major contemporary writers. This work also shows the evolution of Yuki's scholarship from soundscapes to foodscapes."--Scott Slovic, Professor of English, University of Idaho, USA and co-editor of Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data "Yuki Masami has written a nuanced book that theorizes cultures of eating. It is based on her probing interviews with key contemporary women writers in Japan. Foodways, women writing, Japan: it engages at all three of those levels. It provides new approaches to talk about foodways in Japan and also offers new vocabulary for thinking globally on a range of ecocritical issues." - Doug Slaymaker, Professor of Japanese, University of Kentucky, USA "Around the Hearth of Modernity is a work of profound sympathy, critical intelligence, and ethical engagement that explores four contemporary Japanese women writers as they reflect on their lifelong relationship to food, writing, politics, and the daily practice of living. With an innovative structure that interweaves oral interviews and interpretive essays, Yuki's elegant study is a model of ecocritical practice at its best, theoretically sophisticated yet accessible to the general reader. A major contribution to environmental and food studies, this book is a must read for all of us who wish to understand our often ambivalent relationship to food and the natural world that sustains us." - David T. Bialock, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, University of Southern California, USA Food binds us to each other and to the environment. The ways, however, that food brings together various forms of life can change considerably in different times and places. Here, Yuki Masami explores the logics and systems of value that surround food consumption, distribution, and production as expressed in the works of four female Japanese authors: Ishimure Michiko, Taguchi Randy, Morisaki Kazue, and Nashiki Kaho. Masami uses interviews and socially informed literary analysis to weave together multiple voices and perspectives to answer to the following questions: Why do some people knowingly eat contaminated food? How have the commodification and quantification of food affected our social and environmental relations? How has the meaning of making and sharing food changed and for whom? And how are changing relations to food affected by changing relations of language to meaning? This book will be of interest to scholars of food studies, environmental studies, ecocriticism, modernity, and Japanese literature Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Introduction....Pages 1-7 Front Matter....Pages 9-9 Interview with Ishimure Michiko: What have People Eaten?....Pages 11-20 Literary Resistance to Toxic Discourse: Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow and Post-Minamata Literature....Pages 21-49 Front Matter....Pages 51-51 Interview with Taguchi Randy: Approaching the Relational World of Eating....Pages 53-73 Adoration and Resistance: A Literary Practice Revolving Around Food and Contamination....Pages 75-94 Front Matter....Pages 95-95 Interview with Morisaki Kazue: The Logic of Eating Together....Pages 97-117 A Diasporic Intervention Into Modernity: A World of Eating Together....Pages 119-129 Front Matter....Pages 131-131 Interview with Nashiki Kaho: Foodscape on the Boundaries....Pages 133-151 A World of Food and Working With One’s Hands: Hybridity of a Magic Table....Pages 153-169 Back Matter....Pages 171-191