Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City is a collection of eight essays
that explore Tokyo urban space from the perspective of memory in works
of the imagination-novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and films.
Written by scholars of Japanese studies based in England, Germany,
Japan, and the United States, the book focuses on texts produced in
Japan since the 1980s. The closing years of the Shōwa period (1926-1989)
were a watershed decade of spatial transformation in Tokyo. It was also
a time (in Japan, as elsewhere) when conversations about the nature of
memory-historical, cultural, collective, and individual-intensified. The
contributors to the volume share the view that works of the imagination
are constitutive elements of how cities are experienced and perceived.
Each of the essays responds to the growing interest in studies on Tokyo
with a literary-cultural orientation.