Formerly numbered JPN 145. This course tries to get behind the veil of Japanese arts and fiction by exploring this image of the mask in a succession of major Japanese authors. We will focus on a different major author each week, and by the end of the course students will have had a careful look at the face of postwar Japanese fiction. The course begins with the theatrical mask and its significance in traditional Japanese culture, and then looks at the treatment of masks in eight major postwar authors. The masks involved in the stories range from actual ones to metaphorical ones, and from the traditional to the technological and the purely psychological.
All reading is in translation.
No background in Japanese studies is required. Formerly numbered JPN 142. The End of the World in Japanese Literature, and is designed to complement it, although you do not have to have taken the earlier course to enroll in this one. This course will examine destruction on a more personal level, through the theme of death, in combination with the theme of love. Various combinations of love and death will be considered, including love suicides, martyrdom and self-sacrifice, war and patriotism, romantic love and old age, and sex and the occult.