Death came early and often to the people of Tokugawa Japan, as it did to the rest of the pre-modern world. Yet the Japanese reaction to death struck foreign observers and later scholars as particularly subdued. In this pioneering study, Harold Bolitho translates and analyzes some extraordinary accounts written by three Japanese men of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries about the death of a loved one--testimonies that challenge the impression that the Japanese accepted their bereavements with nonchalance.

The three accounts were written by a young Buddhist priest mourn...
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On behalf of herself and all mourners, Elsie K. Neufeld remembers her brother, shares her tears, and asks where in such darkness God is. She goes beyond her grief and seeks to und...
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There is one thing we can be sure of: we are all going to die. But once we accept that fact, the questions begin. In this thought-provoking book, philosophy professor Shelly Kagan examines the myriad questions that arise when we confront the meaning of mortality. Do we have reason to believe in the existence of immortal souls? Or should we accept an account according to which people are just material objects, nothing more? Can we make sense of the idea of surviving the death of one's body? If I won't exist after I die, can death truly be bad for me? Would immortality be desirable? Is...
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In this book, David Lamb supports the use of brain-related criteria for the diagnosis of death, and proposes a new clinical definition of death based on both medical and philosophical principles. Death, Brain Death and Ethics articulates the case for a brain death standard, while presenting an i...
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