The handbook provides a comprehensive overview of how we study Japanese literature today. The chapters survey the state of the field through a number of pressing issues and themes, examining the ways in which it is possible to read modern Japanese literature and situate it in relation to critical theory.

INTRODUCTIONSECTION 1: LITERATURE, SPACE AND TIME1. Space and Time in Modern Japanese Literature2. Literature Short on Time: Modern Moments in Haiku and Tanka3. Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa and Tokyo Space4. Inner Pieces: Isolation, Inclusion, and Interiority in Modern Women’s FictionSECTION 2: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE BODY5. Queer Reading and Modern Japanese Literature6. Feminism and Japanese Literature7. Nagai Kafū’s feminist perspective SECTION 3: LITERATURE AND POLITICS8. The Proletarian Literature Movement: Experiment and Experience9. Writing and Politics: Japanese Literature and the Fifteen Years War (1930-1945)10. Expedient Conversion? Tenkō in Trans-war Japanese Literature11. Reading Unequal Japan-U.S. Relations in Postwar Japanese Fiction SECTION 4: WRITING WAR MEMORY12. Critical Postwar War Literature: Trauma, Narrative Memory and Responsible History13. Writing and Remembering the Battle of Okinawa: War Memory and Literature14. The Need to Narrate the Tokyo Air Raids: The Literature of Saotome Katsumoto SECTION 5: NATIONAL AND COLONIAL IDENTITIES 15. Abusive Medicine and Continued Culpability: The Japanese Empire and its Aftermaths in East Asian Literatures16. National Literature and Beyond: Mizumura Minae and Hideo Levy17. Listening In: The Languages of the Body in Kim Ch’ang-Saeng’s Crimson Fruit SECTION 6: BUNJIN and THE BUNDAN 18. Kuki Shūzō as philosopher-poet19. ‘The Akutagawa/Tanizaki Debate: Reflections on Bundan Discourse20. The Rise of Women Writers, the Heisei I-novel, and the Contemporary BundanSECTION 7: LITERATURE AND TECHNOLOGY 21. Electronic Literature and Youth Culture: The Rise of the Japanese Cell Phone Novel22. Narrative in the Digital Age: from Light Novels to Web Serials23. Japanese Twitterature: Global Media, Formal Innovation, Cultural Differance

"The Routledge Handbook is particularly refreshing because it does not tackle Japanese literature from an exclusively chronological perspective. Instead, the essays are grouped thematically, creating sections on space and time, gender and sexuality, identity, technology and several others. As Rachael Hutchinson and Leith Morton aptly argue in their introduction, it is this inclusion of significant sections on queer and female fiction that differentiates this handbook from its predecessors and makes it truly up-to-date."Alice French, The Japan Society