Let me begin with a story about General Sir Charles James Fox Napier, who was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the Northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujurat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the territory for the British Empire. The British press described this military operation at the time as “infamous” (the Whig Morning Chronicle, cited by Napier 1990, 197), a decade later as “harsh and barbarous” and a “tragedy,” while the Indian press (the Bombay Times, “without a shred of evidence”) accused Napier of perpetrating a mass rape of the women of Hyderabad (Napier 1990, xvi). The successful Annexation of Sind made Napier's name “a household word in England. He received £70,000 as his share of the spoils” (Mehra 1985, 496–97) and was knighted. In 1851 he quarrelled with James Ramsey, the Marquess of Dalhousie (governor general of India from 1847 to 1856), and left India. In 1844, the following item appeared in a British publication in London, under the title, “Foreign Affairs”:

Many asian cultures have rich traditions of self-cultivation that exercise mind and body through physical and meditational training. Research and scholarship with respect to those traditions have focused fruitfully on how the body is cultivated to serve as an agent of resistance against various forms of social control. Of these many writings on this subject, I will here name only a suggestive few: Joseph Alter's study of Indian wrestling (1993), for example, tracks the wrestlers' self-conscious reappropriation of their bodies from the power of the state through a regimented discipline aimed at resisting docility. John Donohue's study of the Japanese martial art karate (1993) explores how, in the West, karate's symbolic and ritual functions create a psychological dynamic that counters the prevalent fragmentation of urban life. Douglas Wile's research on Chinese taiji quart (1996) similarly reconstructs the cultural/historical context in which this martial art was created. He shows that what motivated nineteenth-century literati to create taiji quan was its representational function rather than its practical utility. That is, Taiji quan “may be seen as a psychological defense against Western cultural imperialism” (p. 26) insofar as it produced a secure sense of the national self that helped China adapt to a new international environment (p. 29). All of these studies place the body-in-cultivation in a specific historical context; they maintain that the individual, physical body both registers and reveals the national sociopolitical landscape.

An essential feature of beijing's long history as China's imperial capital was the ability to feed its population despite a geographical location distinctly unfavorable to agricultute. For all ancient and modern states, provisioning the capital is not only a matter of pride and prestige but a question of survival. The failure to feed civil officials, military supporters, and the urban population that serves them is a visible sign of a government's inadequacy and easily leads to political unrest. For these reasons, all states have tended to favor the food security of their cities, and especially their capital cities. In this China has no claim to uniqueness.

The hit was typical in many ways. A gunman fired a nine-millimeter pistol into the car of Mass Communications Organization of Thailand chief Saengchai Sunthonwat, then fled with the driver on a waiting motorcycle. Two other members of the gang who had identified the victim also escaped. Due to the prominence of widely respected Saengchai, the police devoted a great deal of attention and resources to solving the crime. Ultimately, they traced the gunmen, who led them to the alleged mastermind. The assassination, according to police, was the result of a conflict of interest in the granting of concessions for provincial radio stations. When the accused mastermind had offered Saengchai a gift of an expensive gold chain and a valuable Buddha image to smooth relations, Saengchai refused the offer. He further insulted the mastermind by saying that the gift would only be good enough for his dog. This insult, as much as the loss of income, lay behind the killing. Although the hit was typical in many ways, two things, beyond the tragic death of a good man, make this killing academically interesting. First, the alleged mastermind was not a godfather but a godmother. Second, the press paid no attention to the fact that the culprit was a woman. In almost every reference, the word “godfather” could have been substituted for “godmother” with no change in meaning or inference.

While modern readers willingly acknowledge the virtues of informing themselves about the ways the cultural contexts of fiction of various times and places differ from their own and the ramifications this may have for interpretation, we tend to assume that the emotions depicted in the fiction of other cultures are essentially the same as those we find in our own hearts. Scholars of literature exert considerable effort to help readers understand such things as contemporary political systems, kinship structures, marriage practices, and norms of etiquette, but we have not wondered whether the smiles, tears, and frowns of characters of other times and places reflect the same feelings as our own. Love, hate, jealousy, anger, joy, and sadness are popularly taken to be universal human emotions. However, classroom experience teaching classical Japanese literature and close readings of texts have led me to the conclusion that there are subtle but significant differences between the nature of love as depicted in premodern Japanese literature and love as we expect to find it in American society today.