Scheduled Appearances for Milton Murayama

Maui-born author Milton Murayama will be visiting Hawai‘i to sign copies of his fourth novel, Dying in a Strange Land, which completes the tetralogy of the Oyama family saga that began with his 1975 classic, All I Asking for Is My Body. Murayama followed this with Five Years on a Rock and Plantation Boy in 1994 and 1998, respectively.

Book Signings
Saturday, November 8, 2:00-3:00 pm: Barnes & Noble Lahaina
Sunday, November 9, 3:00-4:00 pm: Borders-Kahului
Tuesday, November 11, 2:00-3:00 pm: Barnes & Noble Ala Moana
Saturday, November 15, 2:00-3:00 pm: Borders-Pearlridge Center
Sunday, November 16, 2:00-3:00 pm: Borders-Ward Centre

“Revisiting Milton Murayama: From Plantation to Diaspora”
The public is also invited to attend a special event scheduled for Wednesday, November 12, from 6:30-8:30 pm at the UH-Manoa Art Auditorium. The program will feature the premiere showing of a video interview with Murayama by Gary Pak and remarks by Marie Hara and other noted Hawai‘i writers. A short reading and talk by Murayama and an autograph session will follow. Light refreshments will be served. This event is sponsored by University of Hawai‘i Press with the UH Manoa English Department, Bamboo Ridge Press, and the University of Hawai‘i Diversity and Equity Initiative, and in partnership with the Hawai‘i Council for the Humanities, with additional support from the “We, The People” initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese Characters

At long last the approach that has helped thousands of learners memorize Japanese kanji has been adapted to help students with Chinese characters. Book 1 of Remembering Traditional Hanzi and Remembering Simplified Hanzi, by James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson, cover the writing and meaning of the 1,000 most commonly used characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 that are best learned at an early stage. (Book 2 adds another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000.)

Traditional / October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3324-4 / $25.00 (PAPER)
Simplified / October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3323-7 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Carlos Andrade Book Launch at Native Books

Carlos Andrade will read from and discuss his recently published book, Ha‘ena: Through the Eyes of the Ancestors, on Thursday, October 30, 6:30-8:30 p.m., at Native Books/Na Mea Hawai‘i, Ward Warehouse. A book signing and light refreshments will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Andrade is associate professor of Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawai‘i and director of the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies. Ha‘ena reveals the complex history of a rich and fertile ahupua‘a in north Kaua‘i, blending folklore, geography, history, and ethnography.

Geography, Performance, Design

We do not see empty figures and outlines; we do not move in straight lines. Everywhere we are surrounded by dapple; the geometry of our embodied lives is curviform, meandering, bi-pedal. Our personal worlds are timed, inter-positional, and contingent. But nowhere in the language of cartography and design do these ordinary experiences appear. This, Dark Writing argues, is a serious omission because they are designs on the world: architects and colonizers use their lines to construct the places where we will live. But the rectilinear streets, squares, and public spaces produced in this way leave out people and the entire environmental history of their coming together. How, author Paul Carter asks, can we explain the omission of bodies from maps and plans? And how can we redraw the lines maps and plans use so that the qualitative world of shadows, footprints, comings and goings, and occasions—all essential qualities of places that incubate sociality—can be registered?

Writing Past Colonialism
Published in association with the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, University of Melbourne
October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3312-1 / $28.00 (PAPER)

Incest and Schism in Indian Buddhist Legend and Historiography

“[In Riven by Lust: Incest and Schism in Indian Buddhist Legend and Historiography], Jonathan Silk takes a tale that has major importance for the history of the development of Buddhism, a tale about the man who caused the major schism in Indian Buddhism, and traces it through all of the texts, in all of the major languages of Buddhism, with a bit of Greek and Latin thrown in for good measure. He traces the myth back to its probable early sources and forward to its labyrinthine developments through the Buddhist (and Hindu) world. And since it is a tale of mother-son incest, he discusses its implications in the light of contemporary psychological understandings of incest. It is a highly original work, with truly impressive scholarship, both in the breadth of knowledge and in the care with which all the relevant texts are cited and translated. Beautifully and fluently written, it will surely capture a large audience of scholars, students, and those who take a personal interest in Buddhism.” —Wendy Doniger, University of Chicago

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3090-8 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Kokota Grammar

Kokota Grammar, by Bill Palmer, describes the grammar of Kokota, a highly endangered Oceanic language of the Solomon Islands, spoken by about nine hundred people on the island of Santa Isabel. After several long periods among the Kokota, Dr. Palmer has written an unusually detailed and comprehensive description of the language. Kokota has never before been described, so this work makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the Oceanic languages of island Melanesia.

Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication, No. 35
October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3251-3 / $35.00 (PAPER)

Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan

Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650–800, by Herman Ooms, is an ambitious and ground-breaking study that offers a new understanding of a formative stage in the development of the Japanese state. The late seventh and eighth centuries were a time of momentous change in Japan, much of it brought about by the short-lived Tenmu dynasty. Two new capital cities, a bureaucratic state led by an imperial ruler, and Chinese-style law codes were just a few of the innovations instituted by the new regime. Ooms presents both a wide-ranging and fine-grained examination of the power struggles, symbolic manipulations, new mythological constructs, and historical revisions that both defined and propelled these changes.

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3235-3 / $48.00 (CLOTH)

Kabuki’s Forgotten War

According to a myth constructed after Japan’s surrender to the Allied Forces in 1945, kabuki was a pure, classical art form with no real place in modern Japanese society. In Kabuki’s Forgotten War, 1931–1945, senior theater scholar James R. Brandon calls this view into question and makes a compelling case that, up to the very end of the Pacific War, kabuki was a living theater and, as an institution, an active participant in contemporary events, rising and falling in consonance with Japan’s imperial adventures.

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3200-1 / $52.00 (CLOTH)

The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea

Anthropologists and world historians make strange bedfellows. Although the latter frequently employ anthropological methods in their descriptions of cross-cultural exchanges, the former have raised substantial reservations about global approaches to history. Fearing loss of specificity, anthropologists object to the effacing qualities of techniques employed by world historians—this despite the fact that anthropology itself was a global, comparative enterprise in the nineteenth century. Anthropology’s Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870–1935, by Rainer F. Buschmann, seeks to recover some of anthropology’s global flavor by viewing its history in Oceania through the notion of the ethnographic frontier—the furthermost limits of the anthropologically known regions of the Pacific. The colony of German New Guinea (1884–1914) presents an ideal example of just such a contact zone.

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3184-4 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

The World of East Asia Series

For more than half a century, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimusho) possessed an independent police force that operated within the space of Japan’s informal empire on the Asian continent. Charged with “protecting and controlling” local Japanese communities first in Korea and later in China, these consular police played a critical role in facilitating Japanese imperial expansion during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Remarkably, however, this police force remains largely unknown. Crossing Empire’s Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia, by Erik Esselstrom, is the first book in English to reveal its complex history.

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3231-5 / $59.00 (CLOTH)

Between 1932 and 1945, more than 320,000 Japanese emigrated to Manchuria in northeast China with the dream of becoming land-owning farmers. Following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Japan’s surrender in August 1945, their dream turned into a nightmare. Since the late 1980s, popular Japanese conceptions have overlooked the disastrous impact of colonization and resurrected the utopian justification for creating Manchukuo, as the puppet state was known. This re-remembering, Mariko Tamanoi argues, constitutes a source of friction between China and Japan today. Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan tells the compelling story of both the promise of a utopia and the tragic aftermath of its failure.

October 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3267-4 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

For more information on the new World of East Asia series, click here.