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In this new study of desire in Late Imperial China, Martin Huang argues that the development of traditional Chinese fiction as a narrative genre was closely related to changes in conceptions of the fundamental nature of desire.

Compiled in 940 at the court of the kingdom of Shu, the Huajian ji is the earliest extant collection of lyrics by literati poets. Shields examines the influence of court culture on the anthology's creation and the significance of imitation and convention in its lyrics, situating the work within larger questions of Chinese literary history.

The sacred mountain Oyama (literally, "Big Mountain") has loomed over the religious landscape of early modern Japan. Ambros provides a narrative history of the mountain and its place in contemporary society and popular religion by focusing on the development of the Oyama cult and its religious, political, and socioeconomic contexts.

Hijiya-Kirschnereit brings a sophisticated and graceful method of analysis to this English translation of her book on the shishosetsu, one of the most important yet misunderstood genres in Japanese literature.

Since the 1950s, Abe Kobo (1924-1993) has achieved an international reputation for his surreal or grotesque brand of literature. Bolton explores how this reconciliation of ideas and dialects is for Abe part of the process whereby texts and individuals form themselves-a search for identity that occurs at the level of the self and society at large.

The first full-length biography of a premodern Japanese nun, The Princess Nun is the story of Bunchi (1619-1697), daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo and founder of Enshoji. The study incorporates issues of gender and social status into its discussion of Bunchi's ascetic practice to rewrite the history of Buddhist reform and Tokugawa religion.

Trent E. Maxey documents how religion came to be seen as the "greatest problem" by the architects of the modern Japanese state. Maxey shows that in Meiji Japan, religion designated a cognitive and social pluralism that resisted direct state control. It also provided the state with a means to contain, regulate, and neutralize that plurality.

Melek Ortabasi reassesses the influence of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), a folk scholar and elite bureaucrat, in shaping modern Japan's cultural identity. Only the second book-length English-language study of Yanagita, this book moves beyond his pioneering work in folk studies to reveal the full range of his contributions as a public intellectual.

Hiraku Shimoda places the origin of modern Japanese regionalism in the tense relationship between region and nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study shows that "region," often seen as a hard, natural place that impedes national unity, is in fact a supple spatial category that can be made to reinforce nationalist sensibilities.

Jun Uchida draws on previously unused materials in multi-language archives to uncover the obscured history of the Japanese civilians who settled in Korea between 1876 and 1945, with particular focus on the first generation of "pioneers" between the 1910s and 1930s who actively mediated Japan's colonial presence on the Korean peninsula.

Rise of a Japanese Chinatown focuses on a Chinese immigrant community in the Japanese port city of Yokohama from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 to the normalization of Sino-Japanese ties in 1972 and beyond. It tells the story of how Chinese immigrants found an enduring place within a monoethnic state during periods of war and peace.

The outbreak of the "Minamata Disease" in 1950s Japan remains one of the most horrific examples of environmental poisoning in history. Based on primary documents and interviews, this book describes responses to this incidence of mercury poisoning, focusing on the efforts of its victims and their supporters to secure redress.

Natasha Heller offers a cultural history of Buddhism through a case study of the Chan master Zhongfeng Mingben. Monks of his stature developed a broad set of cultural competencies for navigating social and intellectual relationships. Heller shows the importance of situating monks as actors within wider sociocultural fields of practice and exchange.

Chinese martial arts novels from the late nineteenth century are full of suggestive sounds. Characters curse in colorful dialect accents, and action scenes come to life with the loud clash of swords. Paize Keulemans examines the relationship between these novels and earlier storyteller manuscripts to explain the purpose and history of these sounds.

Investing Japan demonstrates that foreign investment is a vital and misunderstood aspect of Japan's modern economic development. This study investigates the role played by foreign companies in the Japanese experience of modernization, highlighting their identity as key agents in the processes of industrialization and technology transfer.

Sukhee Lee posits an alternative understanding of the relationship between the state and social elites during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties. Challenging the assumption of a zero-sum competition between the powers of the state and of local elites, Lee shows that state power and local elite interests were mutually constitutive and reinforcing.

Ink landscape painting is a distinctive feature of the Northern Song, and Song painters created some of the most celebrated artworks in Chinese history. Foong Ping shows how landmark works of this era came to be identified first as potent symbols of imperial authority and later as objects by which exiled scholars expressed disaffection and dissent.

Catherine L. Phipps examines a largely unacknowledged system of "special trading ports" that operated under full Japanese jurisdiction in the shadow of the better-known treaty ports. Phipps demonstrates why the special trading ports were key to Japan's achieving autonomy and regional power during the pivotal second half of the nineteenth century.

From the 1910s to the 1940s, a wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the Korean cultural scene with differing agendas but shared demands for equality and social justice. Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture, focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression.

The Korean Economy provides an overview of Korean economic experience since the 1950s, with a focus on the period since democratization in 1987. Chapters analyze the Korean experience from a wide range of economic and social perspectives, as well as describing the country's economic challenges going forward and how they can best be met.

Between 1751 and 1784, the Qianlong emperor embarked upon six southern tours-largely exercises in political theater-traveling from Beijing to Jiangnan and back. This study elucidates the tensions and negotiations characterizing the relationship between the imperial center and Jiangnan, which straddled the two key provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

Focusing on Japan's Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China's northeastern provinces, Emer O'Dwyer traces the history of Japan's prewar Manchurian empire over four decades to show how South Manchuria was naturalized as a Japanese space and how this process contributed to the success of the Japanese army's early 1930s takeover of Manchuria.

Knight describes modern Chinese fiction's unique contribution to ethical and literary debates over the possibility for meaningful moral action. By analyzing discourses of agency and fatalism and the ethical import of narrative structures, the author explores how representations of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the 20th century.

The writer Higuchi Ichiyo (1872-1896) has been described as a consummate stylist of classical prose. Timothy Van Compernolle investigates the social dimensions of Ichiyo's imagination and argues that she reworked the Japanese literary tradition in order to understand and critique the emerging modernity of the Meiji period.

Stigmatized throughout Japanese history as outcastes, the burakumin are contemporary Japan's largest minority. In this study of youths from two different communities, Christopher Bondy explores how individuals navigate their social world, demonstrating the ways in which people make conscious decisions about disclosing a stigmatized identity.

By the late eleventh century the Song court no longer dominated production of information about itself. Hilde De Weert demonstrates how the growing involvement of the literati in publishing such information altered the relationship between court and literati in political communication for the remainder of the Chinese imperial period.

Zhao Ma explores lower-class women's struggles with poverty, deprivation, and marital strife in Beijing from 1937 to 1949. He shows how the everyday survival tactics they devised allowed them to subtly deflect, subvert, and "escape without leaving" powerful forces such as the surveillance state, reformist discourse, and revolutionary politics.

Since the last years of the Qing dynasty, youth has been made a new agent of history in Chinese intellectuals' visions of national rejuvenation. Mingwei Song combines historical investigations of the origin and development of the modern Chinese youth discourse with close analyses of the novelistic construction of the Chinese Bildungsroman.

Elizabeth Kindall's definitive study elucidates the context for the paintings of Huang Xiangjian (1609-1673) and identifies geo-narrative as a distinct landscape-painting tradition lauded for its naturalistic immediacy, experiential topography, and dramatic narratives of moral persuasion, class identification, and biographical commemoration.

Timothy J. Van Compernolle reconsiders the rise of the modern novel in Japan by connecting the genre to new discourses on ambition and social mobility, arguing that social mobility is the privileged lens through which Meiji novelists explored abstract concepts of national belonging, social hierarchy, and the new space of an industrializing nation.