On Uneven Ground Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan [Hardcover]

The history of literary and artistic production in modern Japan has typically centered on the literature and art of Tokyo, yet cultural activity in the country's regional cities and rural towns was no less vibrant.On Uneven Groundrecovers pieces of this neglected history through the figure of Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933). While alive, he remained a mostly unknown and unread provincial author whose experiments with narrative fiction, amateur theater, and farmer's art reveal an intense determination to reimagine and remake his native place, in the northeast of Japan, meaningful.

Today, Miyazawa is one of the most recognized figures in Japan's modern literary canon. The story of his radical posthumous rise presents an opportunity to examine the larger history of how writing and other forms of artistic practice have intersected with place-based identity and the uneven geography of cultural production. The first book-length study of Miyazawa in English,On Uneven Groundcenters on Miyazawa's life and writing to recreate a sense of what it was to write about and remake place from a spatially marginal position in the cultural field.

Hoyt Long is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. This study charts an entirely new course in our thinking and writing about texts, authors, and locales. Miyazawa Kenji and his region are employed as focal points to incorporate an enormous variety of knowledge concerning Japanese literary movements and cultures. It is required reading for those with an interest in modern Japan beyond the borders of Tokyo. Hoyt Long reinvents the single author study by examining the life and afterlife of Miyazawa Kenji to reveal the conditions of literary production that initially marginalized, then monumentalized Miyazawa's work. A sophisticated analysis that reframes 20th century literary history and its heroes. Long's study not only provides us fresh lC•