Conflict, Relativity and Despair: An Image of Japan from Contemporary Japanese Literature (Luce Legacy Series)

What can literature reveal about a nation caught between tradition and modernity?

Written in 1981 and newly presented in the Luce Legacy Series, Conflict, Relativity and Despair examines modern Japan through the fiction of three of its most important twentieth-century writers: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Kōbō Abe.

Originally written by Jim Luce as his junior thesis at The College of Wooster, the study explores three recurring themes—conflict, relativity, and despair—and considers how they emerge through tensions between East and West, tradition and modernization, permanence and impermanence, individual identity and social expectation.

Tanizaki's divided worlds illuminate the encounter between Japanese tradition and Western influence. Kawabata's fiction explores beauty, loneliness, transience, and human connection. Abe's unsettling landscapes of alienation and absurdity point toward concerns that would become increasingly universal in modern literature.

This Legacy Edition preserves the perspective of the original 1981 work while placing it within a contemporary context. New editorial material considers how dramatically the international position of Japanese literature has changed during the ensuing decades—from a literature frequently approached in the West as a window into an unfamiliar Japan to an increasingly integral part of the canon of contemporary world literature.

Both a literary study and an intellectual artifact of its time, Conflict, Relativity and Despair offers a distinctive early encounter with the writers and questions that helped shape the global understanding of modern Japanese fiction.

A Luce Legacy Series edition from Luce Publications.

Primary:
Literary Criticism → Asian → Japanese

Secondary:
Literary Criticism → Comparative Literature

Third choice:
History → Asia → Japan

If KDP offers something like Literary Criticism → Modern → 20th Century, I would prefer that over general Japanese history.

This is fundamentally literary criticism, not Asian history or Japanese cultural studies, even though those subjects are important to the argument.

Reading Age / Grade Range

Leave blank.

This is an adult scholarly publication. Don't enter an age range simply because KDP provides the fields.

Series name: Luce Legacy Series

I rather like that. It establishes the series with your early scholarship, after which the forthcoming senior thesis on Kōbō Abe can become Volume 2. Then the series can expand backward and outward into the other historical Luce-family writings.

Print Specifications

For the KDP setup we've developed:

Paperback
7 × 10 inches
Black & white interior
White paper
No bleed, unless you've introduced photographs or graphics that actually extend to the trim edge
Matte cover

For this particular cover, matte is unquestionably my choice. The sepia/ink-wash tableau we developed will look much more like an archival university-press volume in matte than glossy.

ISBN

If you're assigning one of your own Luce Publications ISBNs, enter that rather than accepting KDP's free ISBN. That keeps Luce Publications as the publishing identity and makes much more sense now that you're developing a coherent catalog.

One small metadata change from the interior: I would not put “An Undergraduate Thesis (1981)” into the KDP subtitle field. Keep it as a cover/interior descriptor. The cleaner searchable bibliographic record is:

Jim Luce. Conflict, Relativity and Despair: An Image of Japan from Contemporary Japanese Literature. Luce Legacy Series. Luce Publications, 2026.