The special issue of the Review of Japanese Culture and Society (Volume 37), titled Color and Form: The Affordances of Color in Japanese Literature, Art, and Media, was recently published. Professor Matthew Mewhinney of the Department of Japanese Studies has guest-edited the volume, with Contributing Editor Franz Prichard.

This special issue features essays and translations by scholars from Japanese studies and beyond that examine the affordances of color in art and other literary forms in Japanese culture. The issue addresses the pivotal role color plays in aesthetic experience. It explores how Japanese artists across time and through a multiplicity of aesthetic forms use color to create aesthetic experience, enchanting or otherwise. The issue will stimulate interest in and advance the study of the aesthetic forms and functions of color in Japanese culture, appealing to scholars of literature, art, and media within and beyond Japanese and East Asian studies.

Highlights of the issue include academic and literary essays by Japanese authors and artisans presented in English translation for the first time: philosopher Imamichi Tomonobu (1922–2012), Japanese poetry scholar Akahane Shuku (1931–2021), textile artist and Living National Treasure Shimura Fukumi (b. 1924), and internationally acclaimed ceramicist Takiguchi Kazuo (b. 1953). The issue also presents a bibliography of important works on color from many fields in Japanese studies, including literature, history, archaeology, art and design, painting, textiles, and film media.

The issue’s paired Literature in Translation section presents new English translations of works by literary giants of the Meiji and Taishō eras Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Natsume Sōseki, Takayama Chogyū, Kōda Rohan, and Izumi Kyōka, twentieth-century painters Higashiyama Kaii and Shinoda Tōkō, and contemporary novelist Murata Sayaka.

Access the full issue here via Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/57247