Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) is one of the most famous artists of Japan, where six museums are dedicated to his work as a painter, printmaker and illustrator. This publication is the first publication outside Japan dedicated solely to Takehisa Yumeji's life and prolific oeuvre.

The hugely popular Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934) is an emblematic figure of Japan’s rapidly changing cultural milieu in the early twentieth century. His graphic works include leftist and antiwar illustrations in socialist bulletins, wrenching portrayals of Tokyo after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, and fashionable images of beautiful women—referred to as “Yumeji-style beauties”—in books and magazines that targeted a new demographic of young female consumers. Yumeji also played a key role in the reinvention of the woodblock medium. As his art and designs proliferated in Japan’s mass media, Yumeji became a recognizable brand. In the first full-length English-language study of Yumeji’s work, Nozomi Naoi examines the artist’s role in shaping modern Japanese identity. Addressing his output from the start of his career in 1905 to the 1920s, when his productivity peaked, Yumeji Modern introduces for the first time in English translation a substantial body of Yumeji’s texts, including diary entries, poetry, essays, and commentary, alongside his illustrations. Naoi situates Yumeji’s graphic art within the emerging media landscape from 1900s through the 1910s, when novel forms of reprographic communication helped create new spaces of visual culture and image circulation. Yumeji’s legacy and his present-day following speak to the broader, ongoing implications of his work with respect to commercial art, visual culture, and print media.

This significant historical study recasts modern art in Japan as a “parallel modernism” that was visually similar to Euroamerican modernism, but developed according to its own internal logic. Using the art and thought of prominent Japanese modern artist Koga Harue (1895–1933) as a lens to understand this process, Chinghsin Wu explores how watercolor, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism emerged and developed in Japan in ways that paralleled similar trends in the west, but also rejected and diverged from them. In this first English-language book on Koga Harue, Wu provides close readings of virtually all of the artist’s major works and provides unprecedented access to the critical writing about modernism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s through primary source documentation, including translations of period art criticism, artist statements, letters, and journals.

The Bokujinkai—or ‘People of the Ink’—was a group formed in Kyoto in 1952 by five calligraphers: Morita Shiryū, Inoue Yūichi, Eguchi Sōgen, Nakamura Bokushi, and Sekiya Yoshimichi. The avant-garde movement they launched aspired to raise calligraphy to the same level of international prominence as abstract painting. To this end, the Bokujinkai collaborated with artists from European Art Informel and American Abstract Expressionism, sharing exhibition spaces with them in New York, Paris, Tokyo, and beyond. The first English-language book to focus on the postwar history of Japanese calligraphy, Bokujinkai: Japanese Calligraphy and the Postwar Avant-Garde explains how the Bokujinkai rerouted the trajectory of global abstract art and attuned foreign audiences to calligraphic visualities and narratives.

Focusing on one landmark catastrophic event in the history of an emerging modern nation—the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo and surrounding areas in 1923—this fascinating volume examines the history of the visual production of the disaster. The Kanto earthquake triggered cultural responses that ran the gamut from voyeuristic and macabre thrill to the romantic sublime, media spectacle to sacred space, mournful commemoration to emancipatory euphoria, and national solidarity to racist vigilantism and sociopolitical critique. Looking at photography, cinema, painting, postcards, sketching, urban planning, and even scientific visualizations, Weisenfeld demonstrates how visual culture has powerfully mediated the evolving historical understanding of this major national disaster, ultimately enfolding mourning and memory into modernization.

Publisher description

In a film eight years in making, Studio Ghibli’s cofounder Isao Takahata tells the untold story of Princess Kaguya. An old bamboo cutter and his wife find a tiny girl inside a bamboo shoot and raise her. The mysterious little princess grows rapidly into a young lady, enthralling everyone who encounters her–but ultimately, she must face her fate. This book captures the breathtaking art of the film from conception to production, and features commentary, interviews, and an in-depth look at the production process. “Every frame is worthy of being its own painting.” –Joe Hisaishi, film’s composer

Featuring over 100 unique prints, Modern Japanese Prints is a testament to the continuity of Japanese art and creativity. By far the most vitally creative group of artists working in Japan today, modern print-makers are truly international in appeal. Although they owe much of their heritage to the famous ukiyoe techniques of the past, they depart from their forebears in at least two important respects. In the first place, whereas in the ancient ukiyoe tradition a print was the joint production of three men— the artist-designer, the artisan who carved the blocks, and the printer—these modern artists perform all these functions themselves, thus satisfying their demands for individual artistic expression at every step of the creative process. Another distinguishing feature of this artistic school is that its inspiration is derived neither solely from its own Japanese past nor solely from the West. This book carefully traces the history of the modern print movement through detailed discussions of the life and work of twenty-nine of its most noteworthy and representative artists. It describes vicissitudes which the movement has undergone and the high artistic ideals which have motivated its members in spite of public apathy and the hostility of the traditionalists.

Bringing together Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religious life and the history of Japan, this novel is based on an actual incident, the burning of a celebrated temple. The novel is a meditation on the state of Japan in the post-war period.