Spirit Matters : The Transcendant in Modern Japanese Literature

__Spirit Matters__ is a ground-breaking work, the first to explore a broad range of writings on spirituality in contemporary Japanese literature. It draws on a variety of literary works, from enormously popular fiction (Miura Ayako’s __Hyôten__ and __Shirokari Pass__ and the novels of Murakami Haruki) to more problematic "serious" fiction (Ôe Kenzaburô’s __Somersault__) to nonfiction meditations on martyrdom and miracles (Sono Ayako’s __Kiseki__) and the dynamics of religious cults (Murakami’s interviews with members of Aum Shinrikyô in __Underground__). The first half of the volume focuses on the work of two women Christian writers, Miura Ayako and Sono Ayako. Combining a decidedly evangelistic bent with the formulas of the popular novel, Miura’s 1964 novel __Hyôten__ (Freezing Point) and its sequel are entertaining perennial bestsellers but also treat spiritual issues—like original sin—that are largely unexplored in modern Japanese literature. Sono’s __Kiseki__ (Miracles) and Miura’s __Shiokari Pass__ focus on the meaning of self-sacrifice and the miraculous and survey both the paths by which people come to faith and the spiritual doubts that assail them. Perhaps most striking for Western readers, Gabriel reveals how Miura’s novel shows the lingering resistance to Christianity and its oppositional nature in Japan, and how in __Kiseki__ Sono considers the kind of spiritual struggles many Japanese Christians experience as they try to reconcile their belief in a minority faith.

The books shifts the focus from theory to reality by presenting empirical evidence on a wide range of cultural phenomena in history and prehistory, thereby demonstrating the processes whereby cultural traits are acquired and modified - the dynamics of transmission and transformation.

It pays attention to biological organisms at the cellular level on the one hand and to developments spanning an entire continent on the other. The author traces the distribution of belt hooks and belts from the steppes to North and Central China. At the other end of Asia, Irene Good shows how textiles were used as a medium of exchange in the third millennium B.C. and explicates their cultural significance.

• Andrew Sherratt documents the means whereby complicated technologies were adapted by distant peoples.
• Yan Sun clarifies the mechanisms whereby bronze implements were used to convey political messages locally and regionally in East Asia.
• Peter B. Golden elucidates the ethnogenesis of the Turks
• Michael Witzel reconstructs the complex interrelationships among migratory and settled peoples in western Central Asia during the Bronze Age
• Elfriede R. Knauer determines the origins of the Chinese goddess known as Queen Mother of the West, an enigma that has puzzled scholars for more than a century.
• In another piece of trans-Eurasian investigation, Thomas Allsen provides an account of hunting with trained cheetahs.
• John Sorenson and Carl Johannssen use abundant botanical and zoological evidence to affirm that the Old World and the New World must have been in contact long before the fifteenth century.
• Rounding out the volume is a survey of the problem of modernocentrism by Jerry H. Bentley, in which he provides numerous instances of a globally intertwined past that is not so different from the human present as often imagined.

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction CHAPTER ONE. The Frozen Soul: Sin and Forgiveness in Miura Ayako’s Freezing Point CHAPTER TWO. The Seed Must Fall: Two Tales of Self-Sacrifice CHAPTER THREE. Aum, Underground, and Murakami Haruki’s Other Side CHAPTER FOUR. Literature of the Soul: Ōe Kenzaburō’s Somersault Conclusion Notes Select Bibliography Index About the Author