Making Meaningful Lives

"Making Meaningful Lives is a carefully conducted and beautifully written ethnography about existential human questions: what is a meaningful life and how can we lead it? Iza Kavedžiji explores these questions through the narratives of elderly people living in Osaka, Japan. In so doing, she adds a fresh and new perspective to the preponderance of literature on aging (in) Japan . . . [T]he book captivates not only through its detailed insights on the life worlds of the informants but also through its optimism and its fresh and new perspective on aging and on being elderly."—Contemporary Japan

"[A]n excellent and timely contribution to the literature on Japan’s aging society. It supplies a highly original ethnographic case study approach that allows the reader to view aging holistically from the inside out. Thanks to the quality and depth of documentation and interpretation, it also convincingly translates and interprets the aging experience...Making Meaningful Livesargues persuasively that aging requires a radical rethinking in terms of how society frames individually lived experiences and the human creation of meaning"—Japan Review

"As people 65 and older will come to constitute 30 per cent of Japan’s population in the next few years, Iza Kavedžija’s ethnography is a highly significant book for understanding this era in the country’s history...[U]nlike most studies of elderly people in Japan, which focus on frailty and decline, Kavedžija’s skilful ethnography allows us to see her interlocutors first as human beings, continually striving for a good and enjoyable life...Kavedžija offers her readers a moving and intimate look at the lives of Japanese elders in the 2000s and 2010s."—Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"Making Meaningful Lives is engrossing, beautifully written, and well-researched. It demonstrates compellingly that a book centered on aging and older persons can illuminate much broader processes."—Sarah Lamb, Brandeis University