(DOWNLOAD) "Athletic Bodies and Sport Literature for Young Adults in Japan (Essay)" by Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Athletic Bodies and Sport Literature for Young Adults in Japan (Essay)
- Author : Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 350 KB
Description
In recent years, excellent sport novels have begun to appear in Japan. It should be noted that outstanding works among these novels have been written by female authors of young adult literature. One of the representative works is Atsuko Asano's series known as Battery and another is the series Dive!! by Eto Mori. Both of them are highly regarded Japanese sport novels for young adults, which were published in book form and then recently released in pocketbook edition because they have been very popular among not only teen age readers but also adults. Atsuko Asano also presented Last Inning as the sequel to the series Battery and her second young adult sport fiction, entitled Runner, in 2007. In addition, another female author of young adult literature, Takako Sato, presented the series Become a Wind at the Moment (Isshyun no Kaze ni nare), and this young adult sport fiction won the Honya Taisyou award of 2006, which is awarded by the bookstores for the best book of the year. Although none of these authors ever experienced the sports activities that they describe in their novels, they vividly depict teenage male characters who are absorbed in baseball--(Battery, Last inning), high diving (Dive!!), long distance running (Runner), and short sprints and relay races (Become a Wind at the Moment), respectively--with rich representations of an inner sense of physical activity. Moreover they provide an understanding of the process through which teenage boys construct their identities and establish a relationship of mutual trust through sports. It is interesting to attempt to understand why the authors decided to create young sporting males in their works and further to determine what they discovered about the bodies of young male athletes through their writing. In this essay, I will examine this young adult sport fiction in order to introduce exemplary works of this genre in Japan that remains largely unknown to foreign scholars in sport literature. First of all, I would like to begin with a brief review of the history of sport fiction for young adults in Japan, which can be considered a subgenre of sport literature.