Barbara E. Thornbury – författare

Addresses issues concerning the survival and preservation of traditional culture by examining Japan's folk performing arts and the public policies that affect them.CHOICE 1997 Outstanding Academic BooksThis is the first full-length study in English of Japan's folk performing arts covering such topics as the different categories of presentations, public policies affecting the folk performing arts, performance events within and without communities, and the folk performing arts in literature. Throughout, it addresses issues concerning the survival and preservation of traditional culture in contemporary Japan.Once largely unknown outside of their local community settings, Japan's folk performing arts have today captured universal attention. In Japan, almost every municipality is home to one or more of the diverse dramatic, dance, narrative, and musical presentations that make up the folk performing arts. They can be seen at events that range from long-established festivals to newly created folk-culture and tourist programs.Since the 1920s, a growing body of work by folklorists, theater historians, and other academic specialists, together with literary treatment by well-known authors, brought the folk performing arts into the national cultural spotlight. The postwar Cultural Properties Protection Law conferred on them the status of legally designated cultural assets.

Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City is a collection of eight essays that explore Tokyo urban space from the perspective of memory in works of the imagination—novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and films. Written by scholars of Japanese studies based in England, Germany, Japan, and the United States, the book focuses on texts produced in Japan since the 1980s. The closing years of the Showa period (1926-1989) were a watershed decade of spatial transformation in Tokyo. It was also a time (in Japan, as elsewhere) when conversations about the nature of memory—historical, cultural, collective, and individual—intensified. The contributors to the volume share the view that works of the imagination are constitutive elements of how cities are experienced and perceived. Each of the essays responds to the growing interest in studies on Tokyo with a literary-cultural orientation.

Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film explores ways that late 20th- and early 21st- century fiction and film from Japan literally and figuratively map Tokyo. The four dozen novels, stories, and films discussed here describe, define, and reflect on Tokyo urban space.  They are part of the flow of Japanese-language texts being translated (or, in the case of film, subtitled) into English.  Circulation in professionally translated and subtitled English-language versions helps ensure accessibility to the primarily anglophone readers of this study—and helps validate inclusion in lists of world literature and film.  Tokyo’s well-established culture of mapping signifies much more than a profound attachment to place or an affinity for maps as artifacts.  It is, importantly, a counter-response to feelings of insecurity and disconnection—insofar as the mapping process helps impart a sense of predictability, stability, and placeness in the realand imagined city.