Monstrous Bodies is a cultural and literary history of ambiguous bodies in imperial Japan. It focuses on what the book calls modern monsters--doppelgangers, robots, twins, hybrid creations--bodily ...metaphors that became ubiquitous in the literary landscape from the Meiji era (1868-1912) up until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Such monsters have often been understood as representations of the premodern past or of "stigmatized others"--figures subversive to national ideologies. Miri Nakamura contends instead that these monsters were products of modernity, informed by the newly imported scientific discourses on the body, and that they can be read as being complicit in the ideologies of the empire, for they are uncanny bodies that ignite a sense of terror by blurring the binary of "normal" and "abnormal" that modern sciences like eugenics and psychology created. Reading these literary bodies against the historical rise of the Japanese empire and its colonial wars in Asia, Nakamura argues that they must be understood in relation to the most "monstrous" body of all in modern Japan: the carefully constructed image of the empire itself.
This article is a study of the representation of maids (kahi, jochū) in modern Japanese literature and culture. It examines maids as producers of affective labor—work that is not equated to wage ...production of material goods but one that demands emotion and affect. The article traces the emergence of this discourse in the Meiji era, calling it "the cult of happiness." The study then analyzes the maid and the housewife in Higuchi Ichiyō's (1872–96) "Warekara" (Split shell, 1896), published at the height of the "maid problem" (jochū mondai), when the role of the modern housewife (shufu) was also being determined.
The popular genre known as "irregular detective fiction" (henkaku tantei shôsetsu), the forerunner of Japanese science fiction, flourished in Japan during the 1920s and the 1930s. Yumeno Kyusaku's ..."Dogura magura" (1935) is a representative work of this group of texts and is perceived as the culmination of the author's literary career. For Yumeno, the mode of horror was an essential ingredient for his detective fiction, and in "Dogura magura", this horror arises from what I refer to as "the mechanical uncanny"-the blurring of the line between human and machine resulting from the "mechanization" of human cognition.
With the introduction of the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek (1890-1938) in 1923, Japan witnessed a boom of literature about robots (jinzō ningen). Early Showa Japan was ...undergoing a rapid mechanization process where machines were incorporated into the modern landscape, and these robots became the epitome of the machine's power and authority. At the same time, however, they also produced considerable anxiety about the mechanization of the human body and its reproductive process. This article focuses on cultural historian Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke's short story 'Robot' published in Shin Seinen (New youth) in 1928. It situates this text within the scientific discourses surrounding women and their bodies in the Showa era, and shows how the text borrows the metaphor of the machine to raise key questions about bodily differences and female anatomy.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
