This is the first monograph in English on how China's agricultural collectivization began. In 1953, the Chinese Communist Party launched a system of agricultural collectivization to lean the countryside toward socialism. It led to the Utopian Commune Movement in 1958 and was followed by the worst famine in human history.

From the Foreword by David McCann: "Bishop McKendree's gathering of songs and poems from the Japanese prisoner of war camps of World War II is a remarkable outcome to a brutal experience....The materials were elusive in their circulation among the prisoners, dangerous to those who composed or performed them, and certainly would have been fatal to McKendree, had he been caught with them....

Good Dogs explores the intersection of didacticism, Chinese vernacular scholarship, social criticism, and commercial storytelling in late Tokugawa Japan through an examination of a masterpiece of 19th century popular fiction:  the novel Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi of Southern Kazusa; for short, Hakkenden), serialized from 1814 to 1842 by Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848). 

Gendered Landscapes presents nine short stories and novellas by representative modern Korean women writers dating from the 1930s to the end of the 1990s.  Signature pieces selected from the acclaimed novelists’ repertoire, these narratives address issues related to Korean women as gendered beings in a Confucian-governed patriarchal society. 

Translators and Editors: Elizabeth Markham, Naoko Terauchi, and Rembrandt Wolpert

Despite their significance, the writings on Japanese music by Prussian medical scientist and physician Leopold Müller, published in Yokohama in a series from 1874 to 1876, have been nearly forgotten and marginalized even in historical research on the courtly gagaku traditions they focus upon. This study with full translation into both English and Japanese illuminates and reassesses Müller's pioneering contribution.

Translator: John R. Bentley

Kokugaku (national study) is an academic field of study that spans a number of disciplines, including philology, poetry, literature, linguistics, history, religion, and philosophy. It began as a movement to recapture a sense of Japanese uniqueness, by focusing on Japanese poetic and linguistic elements found in the earliest surviving texts.

A cultural history of writer and literary critic Hayashi Fusa's (1903–75) tenkō experience, Stories from the Samurai Fringe examines Hayashi's tenkō (ideological conversion) through a close reading of his proletarian short stories. Tracing Hayashi's move from "romanticizing"to "defining"to "remembering" the proletarian literature movement and its participants in his proletarian fiction, this study argues for a far more personal and political rationale for Hayashi's subsequent turn to ultranationalism.

The chapters in this ground-breaking volume examine the complex practices of biographical writing in Ming and Qing China. The authors draw on a rich variety of sources to answer some basic questions: Who were the writers of these texts and the subjects of their biographical constructions? What motivated these textual productions and sustained the routes from (re)creations to (re)publications? The informed and fascinating readings illuminate the enduring appeal of representing and represented lives in Chinese history.

Translator: Masako Inamoto

T his volume introduces short stories and essays by Kita Morio (1927-2011), one of the most significant, prolific, and beloved postwar writers in Japan. Also known by his literary persona, Dokutoru Manbō (Doctor Manbō), Kita was a remarkably versatile writer who produced both serious and comical works in a wide variety of genres. 

Editor: Michael J. Pettid

A new collection of translations of Korean fiction from the colonial period of the early twentieth century. The contents will introduce readers to works written from a variety of viewpoints, including those that advocate pro-Japanese stands, to anarchy, and to socialist narratives.