3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course aims to introduce students to a variety of literary texts featuring love and illusion from the 12th to the 21st century Japan. We will explore how enchantment and disenchantment play in the literary imagination of romantic love within Japanese literary history. The target texts cover a wide range of literary products from medieval noh drama to the modern novelist Izumi Kyoka’s gothic tales and further to a contemporary Murakami Haruki’s novella. By reading a variety of narrative forms such as diary literature, drama, epic, poetry, and modern fiction, we will examine changing ideas about marriage, love, sexuality, religion, and modernity within the literary discourse.