Ishimure Michiko's Writing in Ecocritical Perspective

Bruce Allen is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Seisen University, Tokyo.Yuki Masami is professor at Kanazawa University where she teaches environmental literature and English as a foreign language.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionBruce Allen and Yuki MasamiChapter 1: The World of Kugai JodoWatanabe KyojiChapter 2: Antiquity and Modernity of the Shiranui SeaIkezawa NatsukiChapter 3: The Danger of a Single Story: Ishimure Michiko’s Literary Approach to the Minamata Disease IncidentYuki MasamiChapter 4: Mapping Modernity: Home and the World in Ishimure Michiko’s Kugai JodoToyosato MayumiChapter 5: Literature Without UsChristine MarranChapter 6: Ishimure Michiko as Contemporary ThinkerIwaoka NakamasaChapter 7: Atonement and At-one-ment: From Story of the Sea of Camellias to Lake of HeavenPatrick MurphyChapter 8: Ishimure Michiko and Global EcocriticismKaren ThornberChapter 9: Another World in This World: Slow Violence, Environmental Time, and the Decolonial Imagination in Ishimure Michiko’s Villages of the GodsLivia MonnetChapter 10: The Noh Imagination in Shiranui and the Work of Ishimure MichikoBruce AllenChapter 11: Shiranui: A Contemporary Noh PlayA Translation by Aihara Yuko and Bruce AllenAbout the Editors and Contributors

I was in the room when Ishimure Michiko magically read her work, for the first time, to an international audience at the ASLE-US and ASLE-J symposium in Hawai‘i in the summer of 1996—and I also watched Ishimure-san as she smiled at a panel of young Japanese scholars who presented short papers about her work at the same conference. This extraordinary collection of scholarly articles and literary translations, published nearly twenty years after the 1996 symposium, offers a fitting tribute to the multidimensionality of Ishimure’s literary work and to the growing sophistication of ecocriticism. I enjoyed this book tremendously and learned a lot from it.