Dawn to the West: A History of Japanese Literature

Donald Keene is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. Hailed by Anatole Broyard in the New York Times Book Review as "the century's leading expert on Japanese literature, as well as its most indefatigable translator," Donald Keene is Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. He is the author of the multivolume history of Japanese literature Dawn to the West and translator of numerous books, including Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu, Chushingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers): A Puppet Play, and Three Plays by Kobo Abe, all published by Columbia.

The publication of Dawn to the West... will do even more to establish modern Japanese literature as one of the major literatures of the world... Here, for the first time, in two monumental volumes, are Mr. Keene's readable, yet thoroughly scholarly, essays on virtually all aspects of modern Japan's major creative writing. The first volume of Dawn to the West, which is devoted to fiction, contains complete studies of all the important Japanese writers since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, both those widely read in the West and others less well known. New York Times Book Review

• Preface to the Columbia Edition Preface Introduction 1 The Coming of the Enlightenment 2 Writing in Chinese of the Meiji Era 3 The Age of Translation 4 The Meiji Political Novel 5 Tshubouchi Shoyo and Futabatei Shimei 6 Koyo and the Ken'yusha 7 Koda Rohan 8 Higuchi Ichiyo 9 Kitamura Tokoku and Romanticism 10 Izumi Kyoka 11 Naturalism 12 Natsume Soseki 13 Mori Ogai 14 Nagai Kafu 15 The Shirakaba School 16 The "I Novel" 17 Akutagawa Ryunosuke 18 Proletarian Literature of the 1920s 19 Modernism and Foreign Influences 20 Tanizaki Jun'ichiro 21 Kawabata Yasunari 22 Tenko Literature: The Writings of Ex-Communists 23 War Literature 24 Postwar Literature 25 Dazai Osamu and the Burai-ha 26 The Revival of Writing by Women 27 Mishima Yukio Appendix Glossary Selected List of Translations into English Index