Asian Languages and Literature Faculty Papers

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/19591

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Revealed Identity: The Noh Plays of Komparu Zenchiku
(2026-03-26) Atkins, Paul S.
A renowned performer in his own time, Komparu Zenchiku was rediscovered in the modern period as the author of numerous treatises on his art, which he studied under the tutelage of his father-in-law, Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443). Even more recently, Zenchiku has begun to receive the attention he deserves as a major playwright in the Japanese dramatic tradition.Revealed Identity begins with an introduction on the cultural, philosophical, and sociopolitical contexts in which fourteen fascinating plays that have been attributed to Zenchiku were produced. The plays are then grouped into five thematic clusters: the relationship between humans and the nonsentient world, transgression and the suppression or subjugation of the demonic, divinity and its intersection with landscape and the abject, the figuration of female characters as “women who wait,” and delusion and ambiguity in works based on the classic Tale of Genji.The entire study is organized around a concept called “revealed identity,” which is defined as a relentless nondualism coupled with a sense of drama as an opportunity to reveal the true nature of a character, rather than illustrating a transformation of that nature. In this regard, Zenchiku’s attitude toward noh diverges from that of his contemporaries and challenges the classic Western view of drama that defines it in terms of conflict and action.
Deriving Orthographic Data from Classical Japanese Texts with Machine- Learning Methods
(2025-12-13) Chau, Herman; Zeng, Michael R.; Atkins, Paul S.
This project applies advanced machine-learning techniques to extract orthographic data—specifically jibo 字母, the Chinese character matrices underlying cursive Japanese hiragana—from classical Japanese manuscripts. Inspired by the National Diet Library’s NDLkotenOCR and the Center for Open Data in the Humanities’ (CODH) KuroNet, our aim is to automate the generation of jibo data from manuscript images. This automation enables large-scale orthographic analysis and scribal attribution, which has traditionally required extensive manual effort. By integrating modern computer vision techniques, we seek to create a robust pipeline that identifies jibo to facilitate deeper linguistic and historical insights into classical Japanese texts.
Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet
(2017-02-28) Atkins, Paul S
Comprehensive study of the biography and literary works of the medieval Japanese courtier and poet Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241). Includes chapters on his life, early poetic style, poetics, depiction of China in his works, and reception history.
Acquired Alterity: Migration, Identity, and Literary Nationalism
(University of California Press, 2022-01) Mack, Edward
This is the first monograph-length study in English of the Japanese-language literary activities-both reading and writing-of Japanese migrants to Brazil. It provides a detailed history of Japanese-language bookstores, serialized newspaper fiction, original creative works, and critical apparatuses that existed in Brazil prior to World War II, all contextualized within a history of the first decades of that migration. While functioning in part as an introduction to this community and its literature, the book explores issues related to the politics of critiquing literary texts collectively, a logical move that is at the core of many literary studies today. Acquired Alterity presents a case study of one substantial diasporic population and the self-representations of a number of its members, while at the same time providing a challenge to a dominant mode of literary study, in which texts are often explicitly or implicitly understood through a framework of ethno-nationalism. These subjects reveal the logical flaws in this framework through what Edward Mack is calling their "acquired alterity," the process by which their presumed innate identity is challenged, and the subjects become other to the systems they had conceived themselves as belonging to. The book prompts a reconsideration of the ramifications (and motivations) of literary and cultural analyses of collections of texts and the peoplehood constructs that are often the true objects of that knowledge production
A Sufi listening to Hindi religious poetry: Mir Abdul Wahid Bilgrami's Haqayaq-i Hindi.
(1992) Pauwels, Heidi
The Haqayaq-i Hindi is a 16th Century polemical work that defends the use of Hindu (in fact Krishna bhakti) poetry in sama' sessions of Sufis. It does so by explaining the meaning of fragments of this poetry against an Islamic mystic background. It is thus very interesting to study Hindu-Muslim interaction in the sixteenth century. The work is often seen as an example of ‘syncretism’, but a closer study reveals that such is not unproblematically the case.

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