Hawaii Murder Mystery

New Year’s Eve, 1934. While Honolulu celebrates with champagne and fireworks, someone is making away with the Bishop Museum’s portrait of King Kalakaua and its curator. A series of brutal murders follows, and an unlikely pair, newspaper reporter Mina Beckwith and visiting playwright Ned Manusia, find themselves investigating a twisted trail of clues in an attempt to recover the painting and uncover the killer. Prewar Honolulu comes to life in Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s Murder Casts a Shadow, a thoroughly entertaining mystery that evokes a colorful bygone era.

Victoria Kneubuhl is the author of Hawai‘i Nei: Island Plays, published by University of Hawai‘i Press.

June 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3217-9 / $14.95 (PAPER)

Milton Murayama’s Latest: Dying in a Strange Land

Milton Murayama’s long-awaited Dying in a Strange Land brings to a close the saga of the Oyama family. Familiar faces from All I Asking For Is My Body, Five Years on a Rock, and Plantation Boy return to advance the story from the years immediately following World War II to the 1980s. After her husband sinks them deep in debt, strong-willed and pragmatic Sawa takes charge of the family. The war ends and her children leave the plantation camp for Honolulu and the Mainland, but Sawa has little time for loneliness or regret. When asked by her neighbors if she misses them, she replies, “They must look for what they want.”

June 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3197-4 / $24.95 (PAPER)

Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition

At the 1989 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, throngs of visitors gathered on the National Mall to celebrate Hawai‘i’s multicultural heritage through its traditional arts. The “edu-tainment” spectacle revealed a richly complex Hawai‘i few tourists ever see and one never before or since replicated in a national space. The program was restaged a year later in Honolulu for a local audience and subsequently inspired several spin-offs in Hawai‘i. In both Washington, D.C., and Honolulu, the program instigated a new paradigm for cultural representation. Based on archival research and extensive interviews with festival organizers and participants, American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition by Heather A. Diamond, is an innovative cross-disciplinary study that uncovers the behind-the-scenes negotiations and processes that inform the national spectacle of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

June 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3171-4 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

Chan Buddhism in Song-Dynasty China

How Zen Became Zen: The Dispute Over Enlightenment and the Formation of Chan Buddhism in Song-Dynasty China by Morten Schlütter, takes a novel approach to understanding one of the most crucial developments in Zen Buddhism: the dispute over the nature of enlightenment that erupted within the Chinese Chan (Zen) school in the twelfth century. The famous Linji (Rinzai) Chan master Dahui Zonggao (1089–1163) railed against “heretical silent illumination Chan” and strongly advocated kanhua (koan) meditation as an antidote. In this fascinating study, Morten Schlütter shows that Dahui’s target was the Caodong (Soto) Chan tradition that had been revived and reinvented in the early twelfth century, and that silent meditation was an approach to practice and enlightenment that originated within this “new” Chan tradition. Schlütter has written a refreshingly accessible account of the intricacies of the dispute, which is still reverberating through modern Zen in both Asia and the West.

“This is an important book that will significantly contribute to our knowledge of Song-dynasty Buddhism. It joins a growing body of work that seeks to place the development of Buddhism (and particularly Chan) within its broader social and cultural history. Schlütter’s research into a wide range of source materials is meticulous and thorough. Because of the important connections he draws among the state, independent (or local) literati, and Buddhist monks, this work has the potential to appeal to a wide audience of scholars beyond the field of Buddhism, including social, institutional, and intellectual historians of the Song.” —Ellen Neskar, Sarah Lawrence College

Studies in East Asian Buddhism, No. 22
Published in association with the Kuroda Institute
June 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3255-1 / $48.00 (CLOTH)