A review and record of current literature.

The Zen Buddhist monastery Daitokuji in Kyoto has long been revered as a cloistered meditation centre, a repository of art treasures, and a wellspring of the "Zen aesthetic." Gregory Levine's Daitokuji unsettles these conventional notions with groundbreaking inquiry into the significant and surprising visual and social identities of sculpture, painting, and calligraphy associated with this fourteenth-century monastery and its enduring monastic and lay communities. The book begins with a study of Zen portraiture at Daitokuji that reveals the precariousness of portrait likeness; the face that gazes out from an abbot's painting or statue may not be who we expect it to be or submit quietly to interpretation. By tracing the life of Daitokuji's famed statue of the chanoyu patriarch Sen no Riky-u (1522-91), which was all but destroyed by the ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98) but survived in Rash-omon-like narratives and reconstituted sculptural forms, Levine throws light upon the contested status of images and their mytho-poetic potential. Levine then draws from the seventeenth-century journal of K-ogetsu S-ogan, Bokuseki no utsushi, to explore practices of calligraphy connoisseurship at Daitokuji and the pivotal role played by the monastery's abbots within Kyoto art circles. The book's final section explores Daitokuji's annual airings of temple treasures not merely as a practice geared toward preservation but also as a space in which different communities vie for authority over the artistic past. An epilogue follows the peripatetic journey of the monastery's scrolls of the 500 Luohan from China to Japan, to exhibition and partial sale in the West, and back to Daitokuji. Illuminating canonical and heretofore ignored works and mining a trove of documents, diaries, and modern writings, Levine argues for the plurality of Daitokuji's visual arts and the breadth of social and ritual circumstances of art making and viewing within the monastery. This diversity encourages reconsideration of stereotyped notions of "Zen art" and offers specialists and general readers alike opportunity to explore the fertile and sometimes volatile nexus of the visual arts and religious sites in Japan.

The studies in this volume reveal the personal complexities and ambiguities of crossing borders and boundaries, with a focus on modern East Asia. The authors transcend geography-bound border and migration studies by moving beyond the barriers of national borders.

This book explores how social fragmentation led to pluralistic public policies in Chicago, Moscow, and Osaka.

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This volume examines the Meiji Restoration through a global history lens to re-interpret the formation of a globally-cast, Japanese nation-state.

As direct descendants of the great courtier-poets Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204) and his son Teika (1162-1244), the heirs of the noble Reizei house can claim an unbroken literary lineage that spans over eight hundred years. During all that time, their primary goal has been to sustain the poetic enterprise, or michi (way), of the house and to safeguard its literary assets. Steven D. Carter weaves together strands of family history, literary criticism, and historical research into a coherent narrative about the evolution of the Reizei Way. What emerges from this innovative approach is an elegant portrait of the Reizei poets as participants in a collective institution devoted more to the continuity of family poetic practices and ideals than to the concept of individual expression that is so central to more modern poetic culture. In addition to the narrative chapters, the book also features an extensive appendix of one hundred poems from over the centuries, by poets who were affiliated with the Reizei house. Carter’s annotations provide essential critical context for this selection of poems, and his deft translations underscore the rich contributions of the Reizei family and their many disciples to the Japanese poetic tradition.