Foodscapes of Contemporary Japanese Women Writers : An Ecocritical Journey around the Hearth of Modernity

Translated from Japanese, this study exposes English-language scholars to the complexities of the relationship between food, culture, the environment, and literature in Japan. Yuki explores the systems of value surrounding food as expressed in four popular Japanese female writers: Ishimure Michiko, Taguchi Randy, Morisaki Kazue, and Nashiki Kaho.

Food binds us to each other and to the environment. The ways, however, that food brings together various forms of life transforms in different times and places. Here, Yuki explores the logics and systems of value that surround food consumption, distribution, and production as expressed in the works of four female Japanese authors: Ishimure Michiko, Taguchi Randy, Morisaki Kazue, and Nashiki Kaho. Yuki uses interviews and socially informed literary analysis to weave together multiple voices and perspectives to answer to the following questions: Why do some people knowingly eat contaminated food? How have the commodification and quantification of food affected our social and environmental relations? How has the meaning of making and sharing food changed and for whom? And how are changing relations to food affected by changing relations of language to meaning? This book is of interest to scholars of food studies, environmental studies, ecocriticism, modernity, Japan and Japanese literature.