Beauty Matters

In this bold rereading of four literary giants from the Meiji-Taishō period—Sōseki, Ōgai, Akutagawa, and Mushanokōji—Anri Yasuda deftly analyzes their aesthetics while also revealing the ideology and critical engagement that lie behind their artistic ideals. Placing the writers in dialogue with each other, Yasuda shows how they understood ‘literature’ as a conceptual register to think through real-world questions, connecting closely with their subject matter and their readers, then and now. -- Rachael Hutchinson, University of Delaware In this important book, Yasuda takes on the perennially pressing question of literature’s value in society through investigating the aesthetic philosophies of key modern Japanese writers. Her deft close readings of texts that compare the literary and visual arts are remarkably illuminating. -- Charles Inouye, Tufts University Anri Yasuda offers a fresh perspective on the aesthetics of modern Japanese literature. Focusing on major Japanese novelists who delved into questions of beauty at the theoretical, critical, and practical levels, she offers readings of their works featuring visual artists that spur us to gain inspiration from their intellectual, emotional, and sensual engagements with a world that was striated by cultural, political, and social dichotomies that, while not the same, echo our own. -- Indra Levy, Stanford University [The author seeks] to make a compelling case that even in the midst of our highly commercialized and mechanized world that art is still capable of doing something, and that beauty matters. * nymphalisantiopia *