The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishosetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction

University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1992. First Edition. Softcover. Good/No Dust Jacket. 550 g.; XXX, 338 pages, includes bibliography and index, list of introductions, and introduction. Minor handling marks. "Early in the summer of 1985, I sat down at a Tokyo hotel With Irokawa Budai, an award-winning writer to discuss narrative fiction and particularly the autobiographical form known as the shisho-setsu -- often miss translated (as I shall argue) as "I.-novel." We had hardly settled into our seats and taking in the view from the lobby when he blurted out, almost apologetically, " Shosetsu and shisho-setsu -- they are both very strange. You see, there is no God in the Japanese tradition, no monolithic ordering authority in narrative -- and that makes all the difference." Irokawa's words astonished me not only for the directness but also because they brought home to me a truism too easily ignored: that different cultures can breed very different kinds of narrative and that our purpose as readers outside the target culture ought to be to understand such narratives in terms of their inherent dynamics rather than of what they presumably "lack" from the western perspective." -- page IX Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. We are happy to provide pictures of this book on request Quantity Available: 1. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilo. Category: Essays & Literary Criticism; Literary Criticism; ISBN: 0520078837. ISBN/EAN: 9780520078833. Inventory No: 0221724. . 9780520078833