The Coming Death
Traces of Mortality across East Asia
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Explores questions of death and mortality in several key texts of East Asian literature and cinema.
Description
The Coming Death explores the question of death and mortality in several key texts of East Asian literature and cinema. By exposing the specific fields of Japanology and Sinology to the more general discourse of thanatology, Richard Calichman aims to define death more expansively on the basis of loss and disappearance. Typically, death is understood to be purely separate from life: where death is, life is not; and where life is, death is not. Yet this view fails to account not only for the frequency with which living individuals encounter the death of others, but also—and far more radically—for the disturbing fact that life in its unfolding remains at each moment open to the possibility of its own destruction. In this regard, Calichman argues, death must be conceived not simply as an actual event, but even more fundamentally as a general possibility without which life itself could not develop. At issue is how death reveals the emptiness of all identity, which demands that life and death no longer be conceived as purely oppositional. If mortal death can appear at the very origin of life, then the fullness or presence of life is at each instant threatened by the possibility of its negation. Through a reading of the works of such major artistic and intellectual figures as Kurosawa Akira, Tsai Ming-liang, Lu Xun, and Takeuchi Yoshimi, The Coming Death argues for a fundamental rethinking of mortality.
Richard F. Calichman is Professor of Japan Studies at the City College of New York, City University of New York. He is the author, translator, and editor of several books, including Before Identity: The Question of Method in Japan Studies, also published by SUNY Press.
Reviews
"This book contributes not only to East Asian studies but also to the study of death as a general philosophical investigation. Although Calichman focuses his analysis on cultural texts from East Asia—Kurosawa Akira’s Ikiru, Tsai Ming-Liang’s various films, and Takeuchi Yoshimi’s reading of, or rather dialogue with, Lu Xun—the implications go beyond a culturalist understanding of death in Japan, Taiwan, and China. Instead, he brilliantly reads these cinematic and literary texts as a generalized deconstruction of normative understandings of death through various concepts such as time, traces, nothingness, and negativity." — Leo T. S. Ching, author of Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia