PMJS Publication Announcement: September 2026
Abigail MacBain
Dear colleagues,
Below please find our monthly bulletin compiling information on publications by and recommendations from PMJS members. All details below were submitted through the PMJS Publication Announcements online form.
Publication type: Book
Title: In Search of Japan's Lost Emperors: the Tragic History of the Later Southern Court, 1392-1514
Author: Stephen Turnbull
Summary: For six decades during the fourteenth century Japan was contested by two rival imperial dynasties, whose supporters fought each other in the Nanbokuchō War, the “War Between the Northern and Southern Courts”. A peace settlement was achieved in 1392, but for almost a century after that a handful of determined followers of the defeated line maintained their leaders’ legitimacy as the rightful emperors.
Blending history, travel and folklore, this original and innovative work tells the full story of the tragic history of the Later Southern Court for the first time in any book published outside Japan. It combines the author’s accounts of many years of travel in the remote mountains of Yoshino, from where these alternative emperors ruled, with meticulous historical research into the conflicts their supporters fought on their behalf. Legends, local traditions and acts of commemoration that are still performed to this day are combined with more sober chronicles to paint a picture of a unique and romantic period in Japanese history that is richly illustrated with full colour photographs.
Release Date: July 20 2026
Website: Amazon
Publication type: Ebooks
Title: A Turbulent Transition: Emperor Kōnin, 770-775, Emperor Kōnin: Later Years, 776-781, Emperor Kanmu and the Move to Nagaoka, 781-785, Emperor Kanmu, 786-791
Author: Ross Bender
Editor’s summary: These are Kindle editions of 4 of Ross Bender’s translations from the Shoku Nihongi, previously published in paperback. For space purposes, the four entries have been combined. Each includes the texts and translations, a kanji reference list, an introduction to Shoku Nihongi itself, and a selected bibliography.
Release Date: August 2026
Website: Amazon
Contact: Ross Bender - rosslyn...@gmail.com
Publication type: Book
Title: The Japanese Woodblock Prints Companion: Publishers, Carvers, Printers, Censors, Collectors
Author: Andreas Marks
Affiliation: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Dr., Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean Art and Director of the Clark Center at the Minneapolis Institute of Art
Summary: Andreas Marks’ book profiles more than 1,900 publishers and nearly 900 carvers and printers, includes publication lists for almost 1,000 artists, and reproduces thousands of publisher, carver, and printer seals, covering a period from the 1640s to the 1990s. Each entry documents places of operation, active periods, clientele, and issued print series, offering insight into professional status, favored collaborations, and distinctive working strategies. Lists of censor and collector seals further enrich the reference.
With over 1,000 pages of detailed information, this companion is an essential resource for scholars and collectors and a comprehensive tribute to the often-unsung figures who shaped the history of Japanese woodblock prints.
Release Date: September 3, 2026
Website: https://ludion.be/en/books/detail/the-japanese-woodblock-prints-companion
Contact: Leonardo Wolfe leonardo...@gmail.com
Publication type: Book
Title: Cadaverous: Postmortem Contagion and Ritual Immunity in Medieval Japanese Buddhism
Author: Andrew Macomber
Affiliation: Oberlin College, Associate Professor
Summary: From the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, Japanese aristocrats attributed their afflictions to vengeful spirits of the deceased. But in the twelfth century, a new and anomalous ailment, caused not by spirits but the material dead, crept into their consciousness. “Corpse-vector disease,” as it was called, emerged as a new form of “postmortem contagion”—diseases tethered to death that reanimated in pathogenic forms such as ghosts, noxious qi, corpse-worms, and disease-causing demons. In response, Tendai Buddhist monks of the Jimon branch at Onjōji drew upon esoteric rites, medical texts, and Daoist scriptures to craft a healing ritual for their patients. Cadaverous is the first book to examine this ritual and its extant manuscripts. Bridging religious studies and medical history, it analyzes Buddhist ritual healing through the lens of “ritual immunity”—the complex, experimental processes through which monks identified disease agents, demarcated boundaries between self and pathogen, and designed therapeutic interventions.
Release Date: June 2026
Contact: amac...@oberlin.edu
Publication type: Book
Title: The Excremental Imagination: Disgust, Compassion, and Laughter in Medieval Japan
Author: Rajyashree Pandey
Affiliation: Professor Emerita, Asian Studies, Politics Department, Goldsmiths, University of London and Visiting Fellow at the Buddhist Studies Centre, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh
Summary: The Excremental Imagination takes the reader on a journey into uncharted territory, tracking the presence of faecal matter in the diverse narratives of medieval Japan. Providing close textual readings of Buddhist canonical writings, popular tales, romance narratives, and pictorial scrolls, it boldly addresses a subject that for too long has been deemed to be too disgusting or infantile to merit serious academic attention.
Excrement she argues, was a pliant and malleable signifier: In Buddhist texts it was used not only as a metaphor for the foul and evanescent nature of the body, but also as an instrument of compassion, and as a mode for troubling the binaries of purity and impurity and attachment and enlightenment. The humorous tales about shit and farts were forms of parody, which were less about transgressing social norms and more in the nature of literary games.
The Excremental Imagination treats shit with the seriousness it deserves without losing sight of the playful nature of the material with which it engages.
Release Date: August 2026
Website: University of Hawaii Press; Amazon
Contact: Rajyashree Pandey, r.pa...@gold.ac.uk
To recommend a title for next month’s announcement, please fill out the online form. Submissions can be submitted by authors themselves or by PMJS members who are eager to share other scholars’ recent publications.
For any questions or comments on the submission format, please contact Abigail MacBain (abigail...@ed.ac.uk). Note: Please do not email requesting a publication to be posted; only those submitted through the above form will be listed.