Foodscapes of Contemporary Japanese Women Writers ― An Ecocritical Journey Around the Hearth of Modernity

Food binds us to each other and to the environment. But the ways that food brings together various forms of life changes 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.

Yuki Masami is Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Kanazawa University, Japan and currently Vice President of ASLE-Japan. She is the author of Mizu no oto no kioku [Remembering the Sound of Water: Essays in Ecocriticism] and editor (with Lisette Gebhardt) of Literature and Art after "Fukushima": Four Approaches and one of the foremost scholars of environmental literature in Japan.

Michael Berman is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, USA.